Since I returned to World of Warcraft, I’ve been slowly catching up on what I missed in my years away. A few months ago, I capped off Shadowlands, and I’ve spent the last few weeks finishing up Battle for Azeroth, the expansion whose premise I hated so much it prompted me to stop playing in the first place. In the end, was it as bad as I expected?

Yes. Yes it was. The best I can say about it was that it was not as uniformly bad as I expected, and did have some parts I genuinely liked, but the lows were much deeper and more numerous than the highs.

My expectation going in was that BfA would be all-in on the angle of “grr, rawr, go fight the faction war we’ve already conclusively wrapped up like three times now,” but at first, this didn’t pan out.

Surprisingly, the whole burning of Teldrassil — and indeed everything leading up to the outbreak of renewed hostilities between the Horde and the Alliance — is no longer in the game. Now, Blizzard usually does some kind of one time only expansion lead-in event that’s never seen again, but usually it’s nothing integral to understanding the story. Leaving out the entire inciting incident of the story is a pretty weird choice. I think there’s a novel that covers that time as well, so I guess you can still get the story there, but given my feelings on BfA I’m not strongly motivated to read that.

Already I need to go off a bit of a tangent here, because the whole Teldrassil thing never really made sense to me. Not just its destruction; everything about it. You’re telling me the famously intransigent Night Elves all just packed up and left the forests they’ve been living in for the last ten thousand years to move to a giant tree off the coast for no particular reason?

And keep in mind it is just a big tree. The Aspects never blessed it like they did Nordrassil, so there’s literally nothing special about it beyond its size. The whole thing is just a monument to Fandral Staghelm’s ego and Night Elven vanity.

I’ve always had my head canon that actually hardly anyone lives in Teldrassil and most of the Night Elves are still chilling in Ashenvale. I realize that’s not necessarily the actual canon, but it’s the only thing that makes any sense, so I haven’t been able to get my brain to believe anything else.

Keep in mind, also, that most Night Elves are thousands or tens of thousands of years old, so from their perspective they basically only lived in Teldrassil for all of about five minutes. This is reflected by my own perspective as someone who’s been a fan of the franchise since long before Teldrassil was a thing. If you’re someone who started with WoW I can see how it might feel important, but for me Teldrassil still feels like something new and rather forced.

So it’s hard for me to really care that it got destroyed. I get that the loss of life is supposed to be significant, and that the Horde supposedly took over pretty much all of Kalimdor, but nothing in the game really reflects this, so again I can’t really make my brain believe it.

Back to the main topic, without the start of the war to play through, I was dumped straight into Kul Tiras and Zandalar. I took on Kul Tiras with a Kul Tiran Outlaw rogue (as noted in earlier posts), and I explored Zandalar with a Troll warlock. For his spec, I chose Demonology, which I found much more fun than I did immediately after its revamp in Legion, but still nowhere near as good as the Mists of Pandaria version.

Going in, I was much more keen on Kul Tiras than Zandalar, but I actually ended up preferring the latter by quite a lot. Trolls have always been a mid-tier Warcraft culture to me — nothing against them, but not super passionate about them — but I think Zandalar has converted me to a fan.

This time around they seemed to take Troll culture a bit more seriously, and it felt like a much more faithful/respectful depiction of an animistic culture than the campy “voodoo” stereotypes Trolls usually embody. The mythology nerd in me really enjoyed meeting all the loa and deep-diving Troll spirituality.

I also really enjoyed the charismatic and morally grey Rastakhan. I was a bit less impressed by Talanji, who feels too much like a clone of Anduin (squeaky clean heir to the throne with holy magic and daddy issues). Zul’s story also felt too rushed, but at least they didn’t forget to tie up that thread altogether, and all the G’huun stuff was fun.

The biggest downside to Zandalar is that it gets less interesting with each passing zone. Zuldazar is great, and Nazmir is decent, but Vol’dun just feels like filler.

My notes I made while playing just say “Vulpera make me stabby,” so read into that what you will. Even putting aside how cringey they are, I can’t believe they got made into a playable race after only playing a tiny and largely irrelevant role in one zone. So many other races with so much more history are still NPC only.

It also bothers me more than it should that the bad Sethrak keep calling themselves an “empire” considering they literally only control a tiny corner of a mostly empty desert.

Kul Tiras, meanwhile, was mainly just a disappointment. The zones are pretty, and I enjoyed the Halloweeny vibe of Drustvar, but the stories aren’t very memorable. Meanwhile the Kul Tiran people are consistently portrayed as various shades of corrupt, bigoted, and backward, and there’s never really an opportunity for them to reckon with all their many failings as a nation. I kind of just ended up wishing the whole place would sink into the sea.

Jaina’s ascension to lord admiral also came out of nowhere. Not that I don’t think she’s worthy of the position, but considering how much her people demonized her up to that point, it makes no sense they’d all suddenly be willing to bend the knee to her just cause she chased off some pirates.

So Kul Tiras was meh, and Zandalar was imperfect but largely enjoyable. Overall an okay if unspectacular leveling experience. It was once I got to what was originally level cap content that the faction war stuff kicked into high gear, and my frustration with the expansion really started to mount.

What really surprised is how much the Alliance feels like the bad guys in all of this. If you take out the context of the burning of Teldrassil (which again is not even in the game anymore), the BfA storyline comes across as the Alliance bullying the Horde unprovoked and causing mayhem wherever they go.

I mean their story in Vol’dun has you blowing up priceless archaeological sites literally just for fun; the characters fully acknowledge there’s no strategic benefit to this destruction. Oh, and then your next task is to steal food and water from mostly innocent exiles in a desert.

To say nothing of what they did to poor Grong…

You do have to appreciate that the first time we see any real personality from Gelbin Mekkatorque is him going full mask-off racist. Smug bastard sneering at the Zandalari’s “primitive” pyramid (it’s a glorious architectural marvel built around a wondrous piece of Titan technology). The worst part of this whole slog was doing the quest chain where you save his worthless life.

I don’t like it when the faction conflict is just good guys versus bad guys (I also don’t like the faction conflict at all, but I digress), so in theory the Alliance also doing lots of bad stuff should be good, but I found it totally unsatisfying. I came to realize I hate it for the same reason I hate it when the Horde does bad stuff. In both cases the story’s protagonists are just doing stupidly awful things for no reason.

Like, that’s what’s so frustrating about all this. Neither side has good reasons for doing what they do. They’re just being horrible to each other for no reason. There was no benefit to burning Teldrassil. There was no benefit to destroying Vol’dun’s history. It’s just cruelty for cruelty’s sake. You could maybe argue this is a realistic depiction of war, but hell, I’m not playing World of Warcraft for the realism.

At least Sylvanas’ actions can be retroactively explained by her secret deal with the Jailer, though it doesn’t explain why the rest of the Horde went along with her. I wish they’d tied in the later parts of the story about N’zoth from the start, because potentially this whole conflict could be explained by him bringing out the worst in everyone (something the story confirms he does), but as the war is already winding down by the time he’s released, that can’t really be the case.

I’m never going to be a fan of bringing back the faction war, but at least when they did it in Legion they found a way to do it that felt reasonable. From the Alliance’s perspective, it definitely looks like the Horde betrayed them at the Broken Shore, but when you do the Horde version you see they had no choice but to retreat. That’s a way to bring the factions into conflict that doesn’t make them both look like spiteful idiots.

So anyway, the Alliance side of the story is basically just “hoorah for racism and colonialist brutality,” and meanwhile the Horde’s story is just a nearly exact 1-1 rehash of their story in Mists of Pandaria, except much dumber this time.

The thing I really couldn’t grasp about this is why the Horde stayed loyal to Sylvanas up until her weird unforced confession during the Mak’gora. In MoP, it was very clear that most of the Horde had turned on Garrosh by the end, leaving him supported by only a minority of fanatics. Meanwhile BfA explicitly says that most of the Horde stayed loyal to Sylvanas until the end.

That makes no sense. It’s always been the lore that the Horde’s Alliance with Sylvanas was one of convenience, and that no one much liked or trusted her. Yes, the Forsaken are fanatically devoted to her, the Goblins will go to the highest bidder, and some Blood Elves still feel loyalty to her because of who she was in life, but no one else in the Horde has any reason to stick with her. Saurfang is a legendary war hero, and Thrall freed his people from slavery, but we’re supposed to believe the Orcs would rather follow Sylvanas than them?

The entire faction war story is just awful. At least as bad as I expected going in, if not worse. Recasting Saurfang’s voice actor alone is an unforgivable sin…

Eventually, mercifully, I got the end of it, and once I’d finished enduring the faction war nonsense, it was time to wrap up the rest of the expansion, starting with Nazjatar.

I’ve been wanting Azshara and Nazjatar to be the basis of an expansion for nearly the whole history of the game, and one of my biggest frustrations with Battle for Azeroth as an outsider observer was seeing them wasted as a mid-expansion filler patch.

Playing through it firsthand did nothing to lessen this frustration. If anything it only made me angrier. I couldn’t believe how boring they managed to make Nazjatar. The visuals, the story, everything about it couldn’t be more bland. Compared to how colourful and fascinating Vashj’ir was, it’s enough to make a grown man weep.

Azshara does survive the expansion, so there’s still the chance for her to brought back and given her due, but it’s hard to imagine them rebuilding her mystique after doing her so dirty in BfA. What a waste.

The story in Nazjatar is a mess, too, because its flow is interrupted by both a week-long reputation grind and multiple sorties back to Kalimdor to rescue Baine and do more stuff with the Heart of Azeroth.

Oh, yeah, the Heart of Azeroth is a thing. You’d think having the literal heart of a worldsoul around your neck would be a big plot point, but it’s just a way to shoe-horn in a borrowed power system that barely has any story around it until the very end.

It was also around this time I started trying to track down some quest chains involving Vol’jin (or his ghost I guess) that were mentioned in the achievements pane, and I found that they require exalted with the Zandalari Empire. A trip to WoWhead and some quick napkin math told me that would take me at least a month or two of daily grinding to achieve. I love Vol’jin and really wanted to do those quests, but that’s just not happening.

Finally, I got around to doing the final story arc around the Old God N’zoth and the dread city of Ny’alotha. The achievement for the story required doing the raid, and I was already pretty much one-shotting everything with my level 50+ warlock and rogue, so I decided to tackle this arc on my max level monk.

This storyline was… actually okay. A bit rushed, as you would expect from condensing what probably should have been an entire expansion’s story into a single patch, but compared to how they bungled Nazjatar, it’s miles better.

Ny’alotha is something I was actually kind of hoping we never saw in the game. It was teased for so long that my imagination ran wild, and I did not think WoW was technologically or stylistically capable of delivering the kind of surreal horror I was picturing.

I won’t say I was entirely wrong about that, but they came closer to doing it justice than I thought they would. The visual design of the raid is pretty imposing and bizarre, and the concept of it being some dream-state otherworld rather than an actual physical city was pretty cool, if not particularly well represented by the gameplay.

So the beginning and ending of the expansion had their moments, but that doesn’t change the fact that on balance the story of Battle for Azeroth is one of the worst in the game’s history. Like Burning Crusade, it’s not just dumb on its own but also completely ruined great characters and did severe, lasting damage to the lore.

Playing through BfA further my conviction that Shadowlands’ story is over-hated. Shadowlands definitely had its share of moments where I rolled my eyes or scratched my head, but never did it feel anywhere near as painful as BfA did.

My overall impression of BfA is that it was the product of a totally directionless team. It’s like four or five different expansion concepts all blended together, and at least two or three of those were actually good concepts, but combining them together prevents any of them from being done justice. Everything is processed together into a flavourless grey mush.

This is what makes me madder than anything — when a really bad story could have been really good. I can imagine an expansion that starts with renewed faction hostilities but quickly pivots into the characters realizing none of this makes sense and discovering N’zoth has pitted them against each other. As the investigation progresses, it leads them to a most unlikely source of aid: Azshara.

In BfA, Azshara having a plan to betray and kill N’zoth after she fulfills her bargain to release him is barely a footnote, but properly fleshed out, it could have been an incredible climax to an N’zoth expansion. Then once the player is forced to work with Azshara to defeat the Old God, she inevitably turns on us, leading into another expansion with her as the Big Bad.

That could have been a great story. Instead, all the potential of those characters goes to waste.

In game design, I try not to pin too much responsibility on any one person, for good or ill, but it’s hard not to see BfA’s scattered nature as a result of this being the first expansion fully made after Metzen’s departure. BfA feels what happens when a leaderless team throws everything at the wall in the hope something sticks.

If there’s one silver lining here — other than Zandalar actually being pretty cool — it’s that it gave me a renewed appreciation for how much better The War Within is.