May you explain me why BFA was considered so bad??

[klaps_05]

BFA was just like legion - poor at start, perfect in the last patch.

[Beuargh]

One belongs to the Warcraft universe. The other belongs to a tumblr cartoon. You tell me which is which.

the same thing with higher resolution but it doesn't belong to the warcraft universe? this is ridiculous...

[Woggmer]

People who say the design and art of it, really are looking at the issue with rose tinted glasses. The art and design was the best part of BFA

That I agree with as well. The art style of BfA really gave sprang a whole bunch of life into the game. Sure there are some cutesy cartoony stuff, but none of that matters when you have places like Nazmir and Drustvar to counter balance that stuff out. Blood trolls riding these two legged beings with mouths encompassing their bodies, and Drust Witches stitching together living wickermen and creating zombies with pig and crow heads...

[Jamais]

Gameplay makes it the worst.

In Legion, artifacts were borrowed power, but at least it was thematic and fitting to each spec.

Shadowlands covenant abilities are borrowed power, but most of them fit the classes and have synergy with the rest of the toolkit.

BfA systems like azerite, essences and corruptions are an absolute definiton of borrowed power. They were literally tackled on your spec via items.

[kranur]

- The story was bad and you needed to play both factions if you wanted to experience all the content (outside of raids/dungeons)
- The RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG was just bullshit
- Azerite was horrible, like holy shit that was the worst system ever added, Essences were nice but added pretty late
- Island Expeditions and Warfronts were just a borefest with nothing interesting

[TheRevenantHero]

• The lore did not make any sense. Trees don't burn, Sylvanas was annoying, Saurfang did only cry and in general another faction war felt forced especially with the Horde as an aggressor right with Garrosh still fresh on their minds. Oh, and Nzoth was just suddenly there.
• Island expeditions were boring as fuck but the best way to level and grind AP.
• Azerite armor was in alpha state at release. A concept that punishes you for getting a better piece of gear should have never gone live. And it did not get that much better as the expansion went on. You were heavily punished for playing more than one spec of your class.
• There were only 3 zones per faction, so leveling became stale very fast. Also loading screens were abundant. Just going to one of the central Locations of the expansion, the chamber of heart, required 2 screens in one minute. Getting to the opposing faction zones was also annoying.
• Coming from Legion most dungeons felt much worse.
• Classes got pruned in Legion and Artifacts and Legendaries were missing in BfA. So many classes felt lackluster. Also you were much weaker in 8.0 than in 7.3. Not a good feeling.
• Warfronts were way too easy. It was a scripted event, where your faction would always win, even if your team went fully afk (and many players did. Blizzard's solution? Kick afkers...). In addition the Horde got basically one week of free loot from them to equip alts, while this feature was patched out once the Alliance got to play WFs.
• You could level cooking with vendor mats. That bug was not fixed for days (and was on ptr), so people assumed it was intended. Well, Blizzard removed the mats from the vendor, leaving all people who weren't fast enough in the dirt.
• You got +15 loot in the first week from doing a Legion dungeon the week before.
• Bottom line: BfA was released in absolute beta state and some systems never made it out of beta.

SL is not even remotely as bad as BfA.

You're right. Shadowlands was WAY worse.

[loras]

- The story was bad and you needed to play both factions if you wanted to experience all the content (outside of raids/dungeons)
- The RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG was just bullshit
- Azerite was horrible, like holy shit that was the worst system ever added, Essences were nice but added pretty late
- Island Expeditions and Warfronts were just a borefest with nothing interesting

This, also quite a few classes were just playing terribly (not talking about dps results here); felt like they moronically kicked out their class design / gameplay team.


Ironically this could mean that BfA content will be a lit better going forward, as better class design might make old content actually fun.

Edit: Mind you that this does not mean that Shadowlands was in any way good.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Because it was a complete dumpster fire when it comes to story, lore, gameplay and systems. The shocking thing is that they managed to make something even worse with SL, because for every step in the right direction away from BfA, they made two backflips into it's cursed direction again with other design descisions.

[Nymrohd]

I much prefer BfA to SL. BfA was very ambitious, delivered a lot of content and had a lot of lore. I can see myself returning to those continents just to fly around and enjoy the landscape years from now. I don't see myself coming back to Shadowlands.
I have two main problems with BfA and that was Azerite gear working very poorly in 8.0 and the story being a dumpsterfire. The worst part is that it was abundantly clear how problematic Azerite was, the feedback was clear and constructive and entirely ignored.
Secondary issues include how bad the transition from 7.3 to 8.0 was powerwise, the change from the much friendlier M+ dungeons of Legion to the far more complex ones of BfA (and it did not help that seasonal affixes complicated things even further), the complete lack of iteration on Warfronts (a design with so much potential that was DoA because it was only available every other week and there was almost no reason to repeat it, also provided no challenge), the mismatched design of Islands (massive sandboxes filled with lore and unique encounters effectively ready for you to explore them that you were very much forced to speedrun because mechanically even if you had a group that wanted to fool around there was a hard timer to how long you could stay there). I'd also say Eternal Palace was a mediocre raid and Azshara probably the most frustrating endboss design in a long time (worse than KJ with it being problematic in ALL difficulties. LoS is awful).

[Visor]

[LIST][*]Warfronts were way too easy. It was a scripted event, where your faction would always win, even if your team went fully afk (and many players did. Blizzard's solution? Kick afkers...). In addition the Horde got basically one week of free loot from them to equip alts, while this feature was patched out once the Alliance got to play WFs.

Well, this is not actually true. I lost 2 times when many ppl were AFK. Its rly possible

But in fact BFA is good expansion. With decent raids, outworld events, and story. But azerite system were rly trash. And Islands played a bit too mach than expected. As best place to farm azerite.

[Krixooks]

- The story started spiralling out of control
- Islands were repetitive and boring, and queues for PvP islands were long. (Plus tanks were OP)
- Warfronts were unbearably easy, and had NO PvP OPTION.
- Daily quests were boring and repetitive, and seemingly neverending.
- I personally really disliked the Seething Shore battleground, it was very buggy and tried to imitate PUBG.

-On the other hand the zones looked/felt great, I loved Boralus and Zuldazar.

Overall my main gripe was the unending grind- you felt like you had to log on and do dailys, islands, warfronts etc. over and over and over.
Every day Magni screaming in my ear: "YE'V GOT TO SAVE AZEROTH, CHAMPION!!"

[Lochton]

Man this take on the expansion is dumb, really a zone ? who cares lol
you left out m+/raids/pvp/progress and focused on kind of stupid things tbh

Where in my comment do you see, "complete expansion review"? I just brought up world content that truly was messy as hell, in writing and connection.

As for M+, big 'meh' for me. Raiding, I kinda liked those, PvP, BFA made world PvP interesting for me?

[Lady Atia]

I find the concept of Sylvanas becoming a villain frankly much more believeable than what they did with her in SL.

Sylvanas has been portrayed as a cold hearted, calculating character, while the openly genocidal aspect obviously had no nuance, the concept of her trying to eliminate the one force that could actually pose a threat to her (and her fear of death has been well established at this point) was by no means baseless.

I can see a much more direct line from her WC3 persona to Legion / BfA than her SL one.

I mean, considering that Shadowlands removed a ton of agency from basically every character that is affiliated with the Scourge (Arthas, Ner'zhul, Kel'thuzad, etc..), retconned that the Scourge was actually not a unique creation of the Dreadlords / Burning Legion but a mere copy of Maldraxxus (alongside the retcon of the Frostmourne / Helm of Domination origin) and on top of that, reframed the Burning Legion as an Organization whose creation was set up by someone else and basically been compromised since Dreadlords have been recruited, would say that Shadowlands did way more damage.

And here we haven't even talked about how basically every belief system gets fucked over by Shadowlands because the entire myth surrounding the Afterlive is now gone.

I am not defending BfA, but i refuse to downplay the notion that Shadowlands did less damage.
BfA threw a ton of characters into the bin, without question, but Shadowlands fundamentally fucked over the Warcraft setting and you cannot even pull a WoD on it and just close the door behind you.
You can recover from bad characters, but damage to a setting is far more difficult to recover from.

It's usually used in a sentence like "i'd take WoD over this", which is not a praise WoD, but a condemnation of the one it is compared to.

If you get a 2 out of 10, then a 3 out of 10 is actually better.
That doesn't mean 3 out of 10 is actually good.

I liked the additional explanation Shadowlands gave us for the Scourge, and I love the re-retcon of the Dreadlords.

Also, I enjoy it that they "fucked basically every belief system" because that's what they are - religious crap that's prolly not real.

Shadowlands atleast gave us new lore to explore for the Warcraft setting - the only thing they failed was to give us a chronicle-like experience for it. Instead we only got vague hints and teasers because they caved into people wanting "mystery in the lore" again.

[Swnem]

Ok. Well, i don't think it was so bad, but there was a big problem with azerite and AP grinding as well as alt unfriendlyness. That was pretty frustrating. After that it was the nazjatar gear effects being better than regular raid gear and later random corruptions on gear in the last tier. Eventually it got sorted. There was also the war mode with extra rewards with unbalanced factions.
The story was also really bad and it was a waste of such a good villain such as Azshara and the Naga.

So, it wasn't good. But the setting itself i thought was good. I loved the new zones. I just think it would've been much better if the story had been focused on the Naga rather than the shoehorned faction war.

[czarek]

Mid patches were not cool as i remember. Story was awfull. Itemization with that powers were just crap and ofc azerite. In the last patch BFA was good tbh like all of expansions are the best in the last patch :P Corruptions were silly as fuck. I sold one belt with sick affix for 500k and it was normal raid item but the affix were OP.

[Skirdus]

BfA relied on SL to deliver something, anything, that justified its story decisions; and as you can see, deliver it did not

[Starfals]

I dunno, its my favorite expansion. I'm just as confused on why people hate it.

[Hellobolis]

usually wow expansions work like this:

-put in finetuned and less effort required/less important systems of the old expansion. the way they handled WQs between legion/BFA/SL is the most obvious example. but also mission tables, those went from a major feature in WoD to basically being optional sidecontent in SL. legion > BFA also had the artifacts/legendaries > neck/azerite which was another watered down system.

-add in a few new features to make up the difference. in BFA this was islands expeditions and warfronts, both of which weren't received well at all. (and then torghast/maw in SL wasn't received very positively either, but not nearly as negatively as BFA)

-another problem thats more emphasized now that borrowed power is at its peak is that going from artifacts/legendaries with 2 years of dev time to fix issues to neck/azerite armor with major issues is a very rough transition for the player. you always go from strong to weak on a new expansion, but it's been particularly noticable in the last 2 expansions. which they now seem to be acknowledging with dragonflight.

[Celement]

Lot of systems were added that did nothing but add frustration and take away from the content. If bfa didn't have any alternative power I genuinely believe it would of been remembered rather fondly.

Instead its recalled as the grind stupid shit expansion and forcing players into content they didnt want to do.

[Kralljin]

I liked the additional explanation Shadowlands gave us for the Scourge, and I love the re-retcon of the Dreadlords.

Each to their own, but "additional" explanation certainly is not how i would phrase a retcon.

Also, I enjoy it that they "fucked basically every belief system" because that's what they are - religious crap that's prolly not real.

Considering you can literally call upon the Light / Spirits / whatever to do stuff for you, calling it religious crap "that's prolly not real" is pretty ignorant.