I’m gonna just gonna leave this here:
If you think Mists of Pandaria was a childish expansion, you didn’t fucking play it. The opening of the expansions shows the Alliance and the Horde turning what was a (mostly) peaceful continent into a warzone. Not only be bringing their conflict, including machines of war and dark magic, to the shores, but bringing their hate, their emotions, which is what reawakened the Sha.
Right in the Alliance opening, Sky Admiral Rogers orders the Alliance to open fire on unarmed and fleeing orcs who are trying to swim to shore. This is a deliberately shocking and polarizing moment. The game is not equipped to fully convey the weight of that moment. But the remainder of the Jade Forest storyline carries that along, and it keeps going.
Every zone has characters facing the grim aspects of death as well as the way they cope with such things (such as the funeral storyline in Zouchin Village in Kun-Lai) or the negative emotions the Sha feed off of and how they combat them (such as Ken-Ken’s storyline at the beginning of Krasarang Wilds.) Death is everywhere. Hate, Fear, Doubt, and Violence are everywhere.
The first content patch alone is simply seeing the domino effect of everything we do pushing the world further and all of the effects of the Sha. The Sha themselves didn’t need to be horrifying. The emotional effects they had and the chain of events they spurred forward, especially with the Mantid, all caused damage to the continent. We watched Pandaria burn.
And the Sha is horrifying when you think about it, even if you aren’t horrified by how they LOOK. Right away, we see the effects of doubt and what it does to a person. But then we see fear. And anger. And despair. And hatred. And violence. And it just gets worse. And then you realize even the pandaren couldn’t fight it all, just bury it.
And it creates a cycle. The negativity in people awakens or feeds the Sha, but the Sha affects both the land and the people and breeds negativity. Which feeds the Sha. They seem unsurmountable at times as even when defeated, there’s the understanding that they are still there. In you. In how you think. How you feel. How you react. The things being fought in Pandaria go beyond physical forms.
In 5.1, we see the war come to full steam as both sides bring reinforcements and claim even more land and right away go to fighting over it. We see the mistrust on both sides but especially within the Horde. We see the gruesome effects of the Sha transformation and its extremely dangerous nature as a weapon, a nature that thankfully wasn’t exploited by the Alliance despite having the chance. And we see a crushing betrayal sunder one of the largest bridges between the Alliance and the Horde and result in a catastrophic purge as well as a loss of one of the largest potential coups in the Warcraft universe.
In 5.2, we meet Lei Shen and his forces, who have banded with the Zandalari and worked to revive him. The island is a fortress and the efforts to infiltrate it pit both sides against crazed and remorseless darkness. They are forced to put their hatred aside for the time being as the combined might of the Mogu and the Zandalari is horrible. The Mogu tear souls out and use them to power cosntructs and the Zandalari commit gruesome sacrifices. These things are laid right out in the open and are what have to be fought. Halduron puts it best. What we are forced to do to fight them is nothing short of a genocide.
In the turn of events between 5.3 and 5.4, depicted in the patch trailer, we see irreparable damage done to the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, an event that PERMANENTLY changed the world, for the worse. It is scarred and changes the events of several key questlines, such as the first peek of the Vale in the Valley of the Four Winds and the opening of the gates in the White Tiger Temple. This event took one of the most beautiful locations, one of the ones players were used to seeing, and completely wrecked it. The statues that game uses on its login screen were broken in this change as well. Nothing was the same.
In 5.4, the conflict breaches Orgrimmar and in the process sees losses on very side, but the Horde is at its worst. It’s fighting itself. As the Siege goes on, casualties include civilians and innocents. Bystanders who had no choice, who couldn’t leave their home for having nothing else. And we meet the final Sha of them all, the one even Shaohao couldn’t best. The Sha that is good until it is bad, and then it is the worst of them all. We met Pride.
And all through this? We followed the journey of a Black Dragon literally trying to save the world. We watched as his simplistic, childlike understanding of things constantly hampered him and his plans and watched him completely lose it when things didn’t go as planned. We also stood alongside him as he faced his own greatest fear… That he might become his own father or, by failing his goal, end up no different. Wrathion was a character painfully aware of mortality and futility, but in a way that was also very flawed.
Yes, it’s a bit disappointing that we didn’t get a lot of art at that caliber or of that style. Everyone would’ve like something more. But what we got was a measured effort to avoid problems that had been seen just one expansion before and problems that every developer has to deal with.
More unique art assets require more time and you cannot just throw more money or more people at a problem like that. They made several new or unique models for the Sha and let the imagination do some of the work because they had to. Not only would making additional assets delay the expansion or come at the cost of other things, but wouldn’t even with the game.
The engine is ten years old. It can’t do complicated deformations, or certain types of physics or systems, and is meant to be focused on performance on a broad range of systems. Likewise, the art style is focused on making the above seem like less of a limitation. They chose an art style that didn’t require deformations or physics or liquids or complicated effects. They chose a style that worked well even on low end systems, allowing the largest swath of players to share an experience.
In the end, some of the most gruesome concepts for the Sha would’ve been wasted. WoW wouldn’t be able to achieve that level of either fidelity/quality or just that level of extremity and match the rest of the game or not run into issues with development, but even more, it wouldn’t have enhanced anything.
The people who thought Mists was childish would’ve still thought it was even if the graphics were closer to the concept are. The people who didn’t care about the story still wouldn’t have paid attention to the story. The people who want WoW to be a different game than it is would still want it to be different.
Blizzard smartly played to their strengths instead of trying to making it something it wouldn’t be able to 100% be. And that’s what developers have to do. They have to know what they are able to do and stick within that. Blizzard failed to do so during Cataclysm and it caused some of the largest development problems they’ve had in the history of the game.
Mists of Pandaria was a lot more than people gave it credit for. Sometimes I wonder if they just didn’t bother.
