Pixel Amiss

AKA Shadowlands through the eyes of a filthy casual

This is part of a series of post about World of Warcraft’s Shadowlands expansion. Today we meet old friends, push through one of the worst introductory scenarios in the game and visit our new capital city for the next two years. You can find the other posts here:

• PART I – A mediocre pre-patch?
• PART II – Into the Maw

Time for hype

A month has passed. It’s midnight in Europe.

A crowd has gathered in Orgrimmar to witness the start of the new expansion. In the zone chat abound memes about covid and local politics. People in chat throw around the usual dumb jokes. Someone talks of the big raid that just came back from Stormwind (must have missed that, too bad). It looks pretty normal, but it’s much more lively than usual. No doubt about that.

Then everything goes silent.

A new quest pops up on my screen. I am being summoned to Icecrown Citadel by Bolvar Fordragon, the former Lich King. I am to go to Orgrimmar (duh) and meet with the Death Knights of the Ebon Blade, who will help me get to the destination. In front of Grommash Hold, hidden by the crowd of players, Darion Mograine, leader of the Ebon Blade, and Nazgrim, former general of the Horde, await me.

Both are old friends and allies to my orc Death Knight, who also belongs to the Ebon Blade. With Darion, we were raised into undeath by the Lich King and subsequently freed from his control at the beginning of Wrath of the Lich King. We fought together in Northrend against our former master and in the Broken Isles against the Burning Legion. I saw Nazgrim rise in the ranks of the Horde, from a sergeant during Wrath to a general in Mists of Pandaria, where I might or might not have been part of the raid that killed him. Good times.

Sorry, you work for WHOM?

Last time we met, during the Legion expansion, I was technically their boss, as Deathlord of the Ebon Blade. I dug Nazgrim out of his grave and resurrected him as one of the Four Horsemen, an elite force of extremely powerful Death Knights. And did the same to Mograine when he got himself killed later in the story.

It’s mildly annoying that they do not acknowledge my rank. For what I can remember I never abandoned the position, never gave command back to Darion. They kept working on their own. It would have been nice to at least receive a heads up. “Hey mate, there’s this thing happening.”

Eh.

There’s no time to waste on petty thoughts. They fill me in on what happened, how Sylvanas Windrunner, former Warchief of the Horde (the second in three in-game years to go bonkers), destroyed the Helm of Domination, creating a passage to the Shadowlands (this world’s afterlife), and kidnapped some Horde and Alliance leaders. We must rescue them.

A party in Icecrown

Thus, we hurry to meet Bolvar. Darion teleports us to Acherus, our ziggurat-shaped flying fortress, which is currently docked at the top of Icecrown Citadel. And he calls me “Deathlord”, instead of the generic “hero” or “champion” that are used in voiced dialogue when referring to the player character. Nice. Very, very nice.

The decrowned Lich King tells the remaining leaders of Alliance and Horde of the unspeakable horrors that await in the beyond. Of course, it would be foolish to send them there. And Bolvar says he is worried that he might “become bound to the will” of the evil monster that hides beyond the veil, the “true master” of the Helm of Domination, if he were to go. So, who’s the idiot who is being sent on this suicide mission?

Of course, it’s me! I mean, I just spent the last year plotting and scheming to murder the four people who I am supposed to rescue, actively working to help the villain (my orc has a very flexible moral compass, he’s in this job to hit stuff with big weapons). But sure, I think.

Oh, the Ebon Blade is coming too! okay, I’m in. We open a portal using the shards of the broken Helm and off we go. Me and my pals. Wait, did Tyrande just jump in? Oh no, it would be a tragedy if she were to get herself killed.

Open your Maw

A short cutscene shows our forces dropping into the Shadowlands, falling from the sky into this barren, twisted wasteland, dotted by iron spires, skulls and irregular and jagged terrain, a Mordor brought to the extreme. It’s the Maw, or Warcraft Hell.

This is it. We are officially in the new expansion.

This introduction is in some way a change of pace from the last expansions (a trend that seems to continue into the rest of the game). Battle for Azeroth and Legion focused their opening scene on a high-octane (for the standards of the genre) scenarios, an instanced, questless sorta-dungeon, based on small maps and big set pieces, with short, focused objectives and lots of storytelling and interactions between characters.

While much of this is still here, the Maw is closer to Warlords of Draenor‘s Tanaan Jungle. It’s slower, quieter. We explore about one-third of a zone we will see again only when we reach max level, questing and getting a showcase of the big bads of this expansion: our friend Sylvanas, Helya (who we killed back in Legion) and their boss “the Jailer”, master of this world.

Our objective here is to survive, retrieve our kidnapped friends and find a way to leave, while under constant barrage by the Jailer’s forces. And… that’s what we do.

We:

• help the Ebon Blade,
• regroup,
• find Jaina,
• regroup,
• find Thrall,
• get yeeted off a bridge by Helya (Thrall tries fruitlessly to stop her by throwing away his axe),
• see Sylvanas taunting a chained Anduin,
• free him (and some azerothian souls while we’re here),
• see Baine being dropped from a cliff by the Jailer,
• regroup,
• discover that Baine is cursed,
• find Thrall a new axe,
• cure Baine,
• hold off the enemies in the big set piece while our magical way out charges up,
• and leave — unable to take with us the people we came to rescue.

Meanwhile, we also manage to lose Tyrande Whisperwind. Well, this is awkward.

A bit of a letdown, a bit of hope

Overall, the experience felt a bit flat. There is stuff to love, mind you. The zone is pretty in its gloomy emptiness. The villain spotlight is welcome. And, while there are no cinematics around, the final cutscene is probably the best in the game so far.

It’s still a very limited system, but another step forward in the continuous improvement work that Blizzard has been doing over the years: the shots are clean most of the time and there are no weird, artificially smooth camera movements.

The characters move with more precision, and the facial animations and lip-syncing finally match what is happening and what is being said. I want to stress this last point: the recreation of Anduin’s iconic moment in the BFA announcement cinematic, as he summons a shield of light to give us a way out is truly amazing. Nothing that hasn’t been done already by other games (with more sophistication), but I honestly didn’t think that WoW could pull this level of detail in-game.

Still… The quests are standard stuff and moving between them is quite slow (you can’t use mounts in the Maw). The mission doesn’t seem so very hopeless, given how easily we cut through the enemies, and the last stand fails to evoke the feeling of desperation that an almost identical moment, at the end of Legion’s Broken Shore scenario, managed to.

Also, the Jailer is rather underwhelming in his first appearance. He is big, but not massive, and we see him only from afar. We know nothing about him, apart from the fact that he is this scheming, magic dude with a terrifying army, but we kicked asses like that before. He is not the focus in this first chapter of Shadowlands story and I do believe that more about him will be revealed in the future that will make him more memorable (let’s hope he manages to also find some semblance of a personality, even though I’m sceptical about that), but for now? I care more about his goons than him.

There are a couple of OH! moments sprinkled here and there that help keep attention up, like the last line from the Jailer, right before we leave, but Blizzard seems at this point more focused on seeding future plot threads rather than shocking you on the moment.

This is not a terrible thing. In fact, this gives me hope that Blizzard might have finally remembered that just chaining together bombastic sequences is not an effective way to tell a story. The problem is that you still need to catch the curiosity of those who are playing through the zone – big and loud story beats are useful, but when you try to be more subtle, you can’t afford to have boring quests.

The the heart of the Shadowlands: Oro… Urob… Oribos!

That said, it’s just the beginning and there’s lots more to explore in the game, so we better hurry up and leave the Jailer to his evil plans.

The portal we opened takes us to a platform in front of a big, round tower. It floats in an alien sky and is decorated with pleasing geometric motifs. A group of vaguely robot looking people seem worried by our arrival. It’s obvious this wasn’t supposed to happen – after all, nothing escapes the Maw. They fear we might be agents of the Jailer, but any doubt is quickly dispelled, and we are brought before what appear to be rising levels of leadership, all understandably puzzled by the fact that we are alive in the afterlife.

We are in Oribos, the operating centre of all afterlives and our capital city for this expansion. It’s pretty, but rather small, a definite downgrade from the sprawling (relative to WoW’s weird proportions) masses of Zuldazar and Boralus.

Mapping the city

It’s also rather functional. There are three main rings. The first one is outside, where we spawned, and it’s mostly empty apart from few NPCs and the portals to Stormwind and Orgrimmar.

The second ring is where the good stuff is: it’s formed by a series of rooms that cover all our main needs (inn, bank, professions and transmogrifier).

The main one is at the centre of the tower, running around a pit that crosses all Oribos (where we can see a river of souls flowing) and connecting to the various rooms of the middle ring. Around the soul-river we can find four teleporters that take us to an upper floor, where we can find the flight master and connections to all the zones of this expansion. But more on that later.

Everything’s gone to shit

Eventually, we cross path with Tal-Inara, a bigger robot-person who reminds me of an hotel manager and is the second in command here. Yes, because the big boss, the Arbiter, a gigantic being whose duty is to sort the recently departed souls to their correct afterlife like an azerothian Minos, is much like the ice-cream machine ad McDonald’s currently out of service.

Bugger.

Anyway. The Arbiter is KO, and has been for a while, ever since a Argus-coloured red soul zapped her, disrupting the flow of death and destining all the souls to be sent to the Maw by default. Which, as we’ll learn, includes also all the innocents burned at Teldrassil. Yuck.

This has put all the Shadowlands in a state of severe crisis, as everything here is created from and powered with Anima, a substance (which in Latin means literally “soul”) extracted from mortal spirits. Since without the Arbiter the souls are not sent to destination to be milked, the whole realm has been suffering a drought that has, among many things, made travel between the various “worlds” that form the afterlife.

But it’s not all doom and gloom! Because when we arrived, the Arbiter moved! It doesn’t help us much right now, so we focus on the Maw-shaped problem on the horizon instead.

With the help of our new friends, we use the fragment of the Helm of Domination to function as a tether. This allows Bolvar and a group of Death Knights (MY Death Knights, I’ll remind you sir) to join us. We help them set up portals back to Azeroth, take a tour of the city and are ready to tell our story to the leaders of Oribos our story.

It turns out they have no idea who the winged servants of the Jailer might be, but they look very similar to the Kyrian, a group of people living in the realm of Bastion. They might know more. Thus, Tal-Inara orders to spend some Anima to reactivate the connection to Bastion and we are sent on our way.