Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

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This is the sixth part of my write-up. You can read the other parts here.

• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 7 - Classic and Legion

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

Part 6 – Warlords of Draenor

This might seem like a bizarre topic to start with, but stay with me here. It all links together.

The Warcraft Movie

On 9th May 2006, a Blizzard press release announced the production of a live-action movie set in the Warcraft universe, in partnership with Legendary Pictures. Fans were euphoric. Blizzard’s cinematic trailers had some of the best CGI in the world. Even today, they have never released a bad one. Fans wanted something like that, only 90 minutes long.

“We searched for a very long time to find the right studio for developing a movie based on one of our game universes,” said Paul Sams, chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment. “Many companies approached us in the past, but it wasn’t until we met with Legendary Pictures that we felt we’d found the perfect partner. They clearly share our high standards for creative development, and because they understand the vision that we’ve always strived for with our Warcraft games, we feel there isn’t a better studio out there for bringing the Warcraft story to film.”

However good their intentions may have been, the film would linger in production hell for a decade before seeing the light of day. It was scheduled to hit theatres in 2009 under the direction of Sam Raimi (of Spiderman fame), but it was still only in its early stages when Blizzcon 2011 came around..

Uwe Boll, grim reaper of video game adaptations, tried to get his fingers on the film. Blizzard’s response was emphatic.

"We will not sell the movie rights, not to you… especially not to you. Because it’s such a big online game success, maybe a bad movie would destroy that ongoing income, what the company has with it.”

Seven years into production, they settled on a director. Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie) had directed three films and one of them had been somewhat successful – Moon. He immediately set about changing the story, which set the film back a bit, but they were finally able to make progress. A ‘sizzle reel’ was shown at San Diego Comic Con later that year, featuring a battle between a human and an orc. By the end of 2013, the film had been cast, and began shooting in mid-2014.

Warcraft finally premiered in Paris on 24th May 2016. It grossed $439 million, making it the most successful video game adaptation of all time, but the costs of production and promotion were so high that it still made a loss of up to $40 million for the studio.

The film was… divisive. The average Western viewer was alienated by the dense lore and confusing plot. In fact, it made most of its profit in China, where people flocked to see some CGI warriors smash into each other. Critics (most of whom knew nothing about the Warcraft franchise) absolutely hated it. Writing for Movie Freak, Sara Michelle Fetters said:

”Warcraft can’t help but be a major disappointment, the game all but over as far as this particular fantasy franchise is alas concerned.”

Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson had a similar opinion.

”Having sat through this baffling movie’s grueling two hours, I can’t in good conscience even recommend it to Warcraft devotees. There’s nothing here for anyone --neither man nor orc”

The New York Post was very critical too.

”Jones … is trying to deliver something like “The Lord of the Rings” minus the boring bits, but without the boring bits what you have is Itchy and Scratchy with maces.”

It’s true that the film was… a fixer upper. The CGI was impressive but often awkward, the accents were all over the place, the armour looked like bad cosplay, the tone was off, and the characters were hard to empathise with. Nonetheless, it found a following among Warcraft’s oldest fans. On Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, it has user scores of 76/100 and 8.1/10 respectively, which speaks to its cult classic status.

It was a thrill seeing the places and people they’d been playing alongside for years, rendered with such love and care on the silver screen. Stormwind City and Dalaran, the Dark Portal, Durotar and Thrall. It was a love letter to the fans.

The user ‘nerdlife’ had this to say:

”A truly work of love. As a diehard warcraft fan this movie was amazing. So many details, amazing art design and amazing sound design. It truly shows how disconnected the critics are to the everyone else. Me and everyone i know that went to watch the movie truly liked it.”

Here are some more responses.

”Simply a great movie, enjoyed every single bit of it as a Warcraft fan.”

[…]

”As a fan of Warcraft I went into this movie a little bit sceptical, but from ten minutes in I was already loving the film. The majority of critic reviews are pathetic and should just be ignored. The CGI is mostly fantastic, and the story while it is a little rushed at the start is also pretty good.”

In 2018, Duncan Jones would speak out about the issue he raced making Warcraft. It took place during a tumultuous time, both for his personal life and for the film. He said production was plague by ‘studio politics’, with Blizzard and Legendary picking the film apart and forcing multiple re-writes.

Despite all of its issues, rumours circulated in 2020 that a sequel was in the works. The rumours were picked up by Lore Daddy Chris Metzen, who helped create the story of Warcraft, though he has since left Blizzard.

“A new movie based on the huge video game series, World of Warcraft, is reportedly in the works at Legendary Pictures. According to relatively reliable scooper, Daniel Ritchman, Warcraft 2 is now in development, thanks largely to the game and first movie’s popularity overseas.”

Now, you might be wondering why I started a post about the next World of Warcraft expansion by talking about the film. You see, there was a problem. The movie focused on the ‘First War’, which played out in ‘Warcraft: Orcs and Humans’, the original Warcraft game from 1994. It was pretty light on plot, so most of its story was added retroactively in sequels and novelizations. Only the hardcore lore-nerds really knew much about it.

The most recent WoW expansion, Mists of Pandaria, took place thirty years later, and those years were full of incredibly dense plot. Blizzard were setting their film so far in the past and basing it on a game so few people played, they worried it would alienate fans.

Their solution was ingenious. And by ingenious, I do of course mean mind-bogglingly stupid. The next expansion would take players to an alternate universe, set thirty years in the past.

The Big Announcement

Blizzcon 2013 was a good one. Siege of Orgrimmar had recently come out, and players were loving it. They had seen four patches in the last year, and two of the best raids ever. Diablo III’s expansion was revealed, and it looked great. Blizzard also showed off Heroes of the Storm, their first foray into the MOBA genre, the movie was making strides, and the trading-card game Hearthstone got a beta release. In terms of content, it was one of the busiest conventions Blizzard had ever held.

With so much going on, Chris Metzen didn’t have to generate any hype when he took to Stage D – the audience was already excited. But he took his time warming them up anyway. When he promised a return to Warcraft’s roots, they practically foamed at the mouth. The trailer was a hit. You can watch it here.

People weren’t quite sure what they were looking at, but they liked it.

I need to cover quite a lot of lore to give you a sense of what’s going on, but I’ve boiled it down to its absolute simplest form. Feel free to skip to the next section it if you don’t care.

There were two planets: Draenor and Azeroth. Draenor was the homeland of the Orcs, Ogres and Draenei. Azeroth had the Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, and so on.

The Draenei were being pursued by the Burning Legion, an infinite army of demons. The legion didn’t find the Draenei, but they found the Orcs and began corrupting them, starting with Gul’Dan.

Gul’Dan manipulated the Orcs into uniting to form the Horde, and waged a war on the Draenei. In an iconic scene, the Orcs drank the blood of the demon Mannoroth, turning their brown skin green and making them fully subservient to the Legion.

Empowered with demonic magic, they easily overcame the Draenei, who fled (and eventually found Azeroth). In response to all the evil energy, Draenor began to die, and the Orcs were forced to kill each other for what little food remained.

While all this had been going on, an extremely powerful wizard named Medivh was born on Azeroth, with his own demonic corruption. He made contact with Gul’Dan and together they hatched a plan. Two Dark Portals were built, one in Draenor and one in Azeroth, and Orcs flooded through. They fought the humans and succeeded destroying Stormwind, one of the Seven Kingdoms. That concludes ‘The First War’.

The Second War followed the Horde as they moved north, conquering most of the continent. The remaining Human kingdoms united with the Dwarves, Gnomes and High Elves to form the Alliance. The Horde was defeated and most of the Orcs were locked up in camps. One of them, a baby called Thrall, would go on to liberate the Orcs, cross the ocean to Kalimdor, and create a new ‘honorable’ Horde. Here’s a helpful map.

Ner’Zhul, an important dude who I’ve mostly left out of this summary, was chased back through the portal into Draenor by the Alliance. He cast an extremely powerful spell which ended up destroying the planet, turning it into Outland.

Anyway.

Thirty (in-game) years later at the end of Mists of Pandaria, Garrosh is put on trial for all those War Crimes he did. Through some confusing plot shenanigans, he’s spirited away to an alternate universe version of Draenor, right before Gul’Dan convinces everyone to drink demon blood. Garrosh sees this as the moment everything turned to shit for the Orcs, so he intervenes and stops it, as we see in the Warlords of Draenor cinematic. Rather than serving the Legion, the Orcish clans unite to form the Iron Horde. Wrathion (from the Mists write-up) engineered all this to happen because he wanted to conscript the Iron Horde to fight the Burning Legion.

They still build a portal and invade Azeroth (our Azeroth, not an alternative Azeroth), but this time they’re just doing it to be dicks I guess. The leaders of each clan make up the titular Warlords.

If you’re interested in learning more, RUN. It won’t end well for you. You don’t want to get into Wow Lore.

But if you do, here’s a concise history of the entire Warcraft universe told by a friendly Dutch fellow. Go to 13:13 for the story I told above.

The bizarre concept wasn’t as controversial as you’d expect. At least not at first. The community was eager to leave Pandaria behind and return to the themes and characters that had made Warcraft great. Draenor offered limitless possibilities for creative storytelling.

Blizzard marketed it as a dark, cut-throat, visceral expansion. The word ‘savage’ was used so much that it became a meme. When the cinematic came out, Chris Metzen tweeted, “the age of the whimsical panda is over”. To help players overcome to premise of Warlords, they showed off detailed plans for zones, patches, the new ‘garrison’ feature, and even the end boss.

This was a mistake.

Death By A Thousand Content Cuts

The beta for Warlords of Draenor began on 5th June 2014, and by all accounts it was kind of a mess.

A bug caused female Draenei characters to ‘fail to display their default undergarments’, which made it possible to be fully naked. The female draenei population skyrocketed on the affected servers. Another bug warped Night Elf facial textures, which one beta tester described as ‘similar to the aliens from They Live’. The dungeons were ‘violently unstable’, and ‘the loading bar boss was reported to have defeated 99% of players’. All characters were wiped – multiple times. At one point the servers were knocked offline due to a fire at a substation near Blizzard’s offices. One of the servers was labelled [EU] when they were all actually US servers, so that server became overpopulated because all the European players were using it.

And that was just July.

In the PvP zone ‘Ashran’, Paladins were given an overpowered item that let them stun enemies and teleport them to the Stormshield dungeon. A group of Alliance roleplayers began abducting members of the Horde, keeping them stunned while they held trials, sentenced them to death, and summarily executed them. A developer discovered this and described it as ‘awesome’, but the item was removed.

WoW betas are best compared to the Wild West. They’re a chaotic storm of bugs and half-finished assets. It can be difficult to figure out what exactly is going on. But it soon started to seem like almost as much was being taken away from Draenor as was being added.

On 26 June, Blizzard cancelled the cities. The beautiful temple complex of Karabor had been promised to the Alliance, and the Horde had been offered Bladespire Citadel, a colossal and intimidating fortress. The buildings remained as empty shells where a few story quests took place, but were otherwise abandoned. Instead, players would get Warspear and Stormshield, small villages made from generic assets, nested on either end of Ashran.

The reaction was immediate. Complaints filled every forum. The main MMOChampion thread stretched out to well over six-hundred pages. There wasn’t much debate – everyone was pissed off.

“Yes I was positive about other changes in warlords, but this one makes me one to not play the game.”

[…]

“This is absolutely horrible, why would they do this?! I don’t understand. I was looking forward to these cities a lot. Please change it back.”

The community speculated on why this had happened. Was Blizzard cramming the Horde and Alliance together to encourage PvP? Was there a lore reason? Did they have more important plans for Bladespire and Karabor? Some players believed the faction capitals were being made deliberately shitty because Blizzard were going to introduce new, cooler ones later (LINKS TO REDDIT).

Blizzard tried to create some story-based reason, which was immediately torn apart in a storm of mockery (LINKS TO REDDIT) and sarcasm.

As more information came out, it became clear that the truth was much less exciting. Blizzard was struggling for time. Bashiok, one of the developers, said ‘We saw how much time it would take, said that’s not reasonable, and went for a reasonable solution’.

But if you read my previous post, you would know why that explanation fell on deaf ears. Mists of Pandaria had the longest content drought ever, specifically due to the development of warlords taking so long. So this expansion was taking longer to make, but delivering less? (LINKS TO REDDIT)

“This is a huge part of every expansion (LINKS TO REDDIT) because it’s where we spend the most time in the expansions lifetime. And after our previous lackluster faction hubs in MoP to have an even more lackluster faction hub in warlords puts a MAJOR damper on my excitement. I REALLY hope blizzard finds a way to give us what we want.”

[…]

“Ice Mountain Tower would have been better. That’s something new for a city. Instead we got Orc Camp 37G.”

[…]

"Fuck the shattered capital, beacon of light in a dark world. Fuck the mystical floating city. Fuck the golden pavilion hidden away in the ancient grove.

We’ve got wooden huts with red roofs! Maybe get some sharpened logs jutting out everywhere. Slap some spikey iron on a couple of the important buildings. And the floor can stay dirt."

There was a subset of players who tried to defend the decision, pointing out that things can change during the beta of a video game and it doesn’t always constitute broken promises, or that it simply didn’t matter.

"People are making this a bigger issue than it is. (LINKS TO REDDIT) Your just going to use it for portals and the bank anyway so what is the problem?

Honestly, I’m fine with the change. Apparently the sky is falling circle jerk revolving around this change is so strong that someone trying to stay positive is treated as a pariah, though."

The outrage which flared in response to this logic was almost worse than the fury aimed at Blizzard. The fans began to turn on one another. It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.

“Suddenly the thread is full of people who never commented on the issue before, for some reason trying to support Blizzard’s bullshit. Smells pretty bad in here. Lots of people aren’t just going to follow along with blizzard on this one, fucking deal with it.”

At first Blizzard had given the impression that the cities had been cancelled during development. It later came to light that though the exteriors were complete, there was ‘never any actual work done to build them into faction hubs’. It seemed Blizzard had known for a while that the cities were never going to materialise – perhaps even before Blizzcon - but they had chosen to avoid mentioning it until as late as the beta. It was never going to go down well.

“So they were teased specifically to get people to preorder the expansion with no intention of actually making them?”

This realisation only added more fuel to the fire.

“Thats not even changing their minds during the developing process, which they said they did, they just fucking lied when they told us Karabor would be a city.”

The discourse was getting rough, but the cuts had barely begun.

Things were disappearing from the map. This included a large island at the bottom-left of the main continent and Farahlon - one of the main zones revealed at Blizzcon. The loss of Farahlon was particularly controversial because it was meant to become Netherstorm in Outland.

“It’s such a shame (LINKS TO REDDIT), because it was the zone I was looking the most forward to, and now that it doesn’t even exist on Draenor, Netherstorm feels out of place…”

[…]

“Not having Farahlon leaves the experience of seeing Draenor pre-shattering incomplete, IMO.”

[…]

“Fucking half assed expansion.”

The explanation Blizzard gave for abandoning the zone was rooted in a lack of direction - no one could agree on how Netherstorm should have looked before it was destroyed. In a later Blizzcon, the developers revealed that the zone was originally planned as a starting area for boosted characters, but the idea was abandoned. Whether that is true, or Blizzard was simply struggling with time and resources, we may never know. We can only be sure that it was scrapped early on, at a time when almost nothing had been built yet.

Since Farahlon was promised as patch content, nobody could be quite sure whether it had been cancelled or simply delayed. There was no big bombshell moment. Blizzard certainly weren’t offering one.

“I don’t necessarily think it’s confirmed it’s not coming so I’m holding out a tiny bit of hope but I’m not too optimistic about it.”

Time passed and the map stayed empty and players were left to draw their own conclusions.

The third blow came on the 24th of July when Blizzard cut Tanaan Jungle from launch. Once again this major announcement came in the form of a tweet from a developer, but at least this time they were able to offer a little clarity. It would still arrive in the form of a patch. As Tanaan was the base of the Iron Horde, Blizzard explained, it wouldn’t be practical for players to go there straight away. And it surely had nothing to do with the fact that the zone was so incomplete on the current beta that it could barely be recognised.

The excuse would have gone down more smoothly if it hasn’t accompanied yet another lie. Once again, Blizzard said:

“As to Tanaan, the rest of the zone has always been planned as patch content.”

Players were quick to pick holes in that.

“For having been in and following the beta there has been no evidence or hint Tanaan would be pushed into another patch. I don’t mind personally but there has been absolutely 0 hints on Tanaan being “intended” to be a patch.”

[…]

"I feel if that’s the case then this should have been clarified earlier. Today is the first day that its been mentioned that the rest of Tanaan is a patch zone, it’s been months since WoD was announced. People have been thinking Tanaan in its entirety would have been with WoD launch.

I have zero issue with the rest of Tanaan zone being patch content, personally. If that was always the plan, then it is what it is. But the lack of communication is disconcerting."

[…]

“Their PR is horrible nowadays (LINKS TO REDDIT). How do they advertise a zone at BlizzCon and then act like we misinterpreted when it was coming out? We understood Farahlon’s status as a patch content area easily enough. Tanaan was never presented that way.”

To those players closely involved in the beta, it was impossible not to notice that this was a recurring issue. It was starting to draw attention.

“It seems like every week something is getting cut, gated or completely changed from what was announced and hyped people up at Blizzcon.”

[…]

“They are getting caught with their pants down, time and time again now.”

[…]

“Something is definitely going on behind closed curtains over at Blizzard, the amount of cut content is ludicrous.”

[…]

“We can only speculate as to what caused so many issues inside Blizzard.”

Then there was the Zangar Sea, which was implied to be a zone – it had its own music, its own enemies, concept art, and someone had clearly started building it. In fact the seas all around the continent were surprisingly detailed. But the Zangar Sea simply never materialised.

There was never any official statement on Zangar. After everything else that had been cut, no one held out much hope.

“Most likely scrapped.”

At Blizzcon, developers discussed the Gorian Empire, the homeland of the Ogres. They heavily implied it might be explored in a patch. But like so much else, it was cut.

While we’re on the topic of cut content, I need to mention the Chronal Spire. This appeared in very early maps as the gateway from Azeroth to Draenor. For whatever reason, Blizzard changed their plans to have players enter through the Dark Portal instead. The only problem was that they had already paid Christie Golden to write the book leading into the expansion. Garrosh travelled to Draenor with the help a rogue bronze dragon (the ones with power over timelines).

By changing this plot point, they undermined the book’s narrative, and caused a number of plot holes to appear. By connecting the dark portal in Azeroth to Draenor, they effectively cut off access to Outland. And since players broke that new connection immediately after visiting Draenor, the Dark Portal was rendered useless. Nowadays when players step through, they are teleported to Ashran – which makes no in-game sense whatsoever.

This Bronze Dragon stuff is actually kind of important and cutting it is a huge issue, but I digress.

The player Kikiteno summarised it this way: (LINKS TO REDDIT)

"Blizzard stated they didn’t want this to come across as a “time travel expansion” so they really toned down any and all elements of chronal/bronze/infinite anything.

The problem is WoD became a time travel expansion the moment they decided to use fucking time travel as a plot device. Honestly, I would have preferred a time travel expansion, as dumb as it would have been, to a goddamn orc expansion."

But goddamn orcs is what they would get.

A Promising Start

Gamers can be fickle. After all the cuts, all the convoluted plot threads, the bad communication, the messy beta, and after much of the community had begun to notice serious problems behind the scenes at Blizzard, all it took to turn the tide was one really good cinematic. We’ve talked about the trailer before, but I really need to emphasise just how popular it was. To this day, it remains the most viewed video on the World of Warcraft YouTube channel. It had an extraordinary effect. The hype hadn’t been this intense since just before Cataclysm.

There were also the shorts. To promote Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard had released ‘The Burdens of Shaohao’, a set of animations explaining the themes of the expansion. Warlords of Draenor established this as a tradition. If you’re interested in seeing them all, the other sets are, ‘Harbingers’, ‘Warbringers’, and ‘Afterlives’.

Even at this point, perceptive players were beginning to voice serious doubts, but they were helpless in the face of the expansion’s unstoppable momentum. When Warlords released, ten million players flooded its servers. No one in their wildest dreams had predicted numbers like these. Clearly Blizzard hadn’t either, because in the days that followed, almost every realm was brought low by rolling crashes and waves of lag. Most players could barely stay logged on, let alone make progress. Garrisons were totally unusable. Even moving near the garrison area caused the game to break.

It was a problem, but to Blizzard, it was a good problem.

And what’s more, fans loved it. The zones were beautiful, the stories were well-told and ended with lavish in-game cinematics, the dungeons were fun (though there were angry murmurs about how few there were), the garrison system was incredibly popular, and while there was only one raid available at launch, it was extremely good. The Warcraft renaissance heralded by Siege of Orgrimmar was a bust, but this felt real. WoW was back.

While we’re here, let’s just look at what the final product contained.

There were six questing zones, but one was exclusive to each faction. The introductory sequence involved players beating back the Iron Horde at the Dark Portal, passing through, and shutting it down from the inside. Trapped in this new world, players fled on boats to their starting zones.

The Horde started in Frostfire Ridge, a snowy region littered with jagged volcanoes and full of Orcish architecture. Players followed Thrall as he got to know some of Warcraft’s big-name Orcs, such as Orgrim Doomhammer and Durotan – Thrall’s dad.

The Alliance got Shadowmoon Valley, widely considered to be the stand-out zone of the expansion. It was a blue-tinted land full of willows, glowing fae creatures, and crystalline Draenei temples. Its focal character was Yrel, a young paladin trying to find purpose.

After completing their starting zone, players were sent to Gorgrond, a beautiful and wild zone based on Yellowstone park. It typified the ‘savagery’ Blizzard had promised. Then came Talador, a Draenei zone full of fantasy forests. Spires of Arak followed, a totally original zone which explored the origins of Outland’s Arrakoa. Cities were built into its twisted rock formations, and made for an impressive sight. Finally came Nagrand, a remake of the most beloved Burning Crusade zone. It was very similar to the original, and players wouldn’t have wanted anything else.

Blizzard had clearly taken liberties when they designed Draenor, creating zones that had no business existing and ignoring zones which should have been there, but the ‘tourist sights’ had been preserved. The Dark Portal, Black Temple, Auchindoun, Shattrath, Oshu’gun. Blizzard had become masters at exploiting the draw of nostalgia, and they did it excellently here.

Pandaria’s treasures, lore tidbits, and rare enemies had been so popular, Blizzard took them to the next extreme. Draenor was packed full of things to find. Exploring was half of the fun. These zones also saw the advent of World Quests - rather than follow the tightly-choreographed story, they offered broad goals which could be completed in numerous ways, and gave the player huge EXP rewards. It was a welcome change that made levelling alts easier than it had ever been.

Every zone offered the option of two unique abilities which would only be available in that zone. It might be a mount you could use while in combat, or a tank, or a second hearthstone, or the option to call in an airstrike. Each one opened up new gameplay options, and made every zone feel distinct. Players loved it. The idea of ‘borrowed power’ would be much more prevalent in later expansions, and much more controversial, but in Warlords it was beloved.

After reaching max-level, it all became about the garrison. The much-maligned dailies of Mists were almost completely gone, and what little ones remained were kind of pointless. Choosing which buildings to place, upgrading them, collecting followers, and sending them out on missions was incredibly fun. You could have your own inn, your own bank and auction house and farm and mine. It was the player housing that the community had begged for since the game began. The system was popular.

“It’s an interesting iteration of the Panda farms, but the garrisons are good enough at this point to make it interesting to think about how future expansions will incorporate the tech. Farm to garrison to…what? Your own city? Your own airship? It’ll be fun to see how they top this.”

At this point, you might be starting to wonder why anyone hated Warlords at all.

Writing for Polygon, Phillip Kollar said:

“At launch, this expansion was a brilliant addition to an already massive game, brimming with new ideas and dozens of potential directions to take things in the future. But following release, Blizzard dropped the ball in a way so spectacular that it’s still hard to believe.”

The Problems With Garrisons

It didn’t take long for the first cracks to show.

After a month or two, everyone finished getting their garrisons how they liked them, and settled in for the long haul. The entire end-game was built up around garrisons, and every commodity players could possibly need was within arm’s reach. They were simply too convenient. No one had any reason to leave. Rather than purely acting as a nice place to hang out (like player housing in every other game), Blizzard had needed to make them ‘practical’, and this backfired immensely.

Writing for Massively Overpowered, Eliot Lefebvre suggested that the problem with garrisons was Blizzard’s aversion to customisation for the sake of customisation.

"…the design choices were pretty much universally made with a strictly functional viewpoint. The stated goal of having WoW‘s version of housing fell away based upon the designer assertion that no one wants to play The Sims in WoW, disregarding that the two aren’t mutually exclusive goals. There’s space to argue that these were bad choices, but I think that ties in nicely with examining the other major complaint about Garrisons being an unpleasant chore.

When you can get better rewards from Garrisons than from doing anything else short of Heroic raiding, so to speak, you are naturally going to do that, because why would you not?"

Since every aspect of the garrison had to carry a clear practical purpose, Blizzard found themselves increasingly limited in the customisation options. The features advertised at Blizzcon gradually fell away. Players couldn’t choose which zone to build their garrison in, as they had been promised. They couldn’t choose between multiple layouts - that was scrapped in development. They couldn’t name followers or display trophies taken from enemies. They were very limited in which buildings could go where.

"I think the biggest misstep here is that Blizzard stubbornly refused to acknowledge that players don’t just want an identical castle to everyone else in the game, but that they craved their own personal space to customize.

There is virtually no room in garrisons to express individual creativity. Sure, you can place buildings slightly different and choose music and I think pick a tapestry here or there, but my garrison is going to look pretty much the same as every other alliance character’s place.

Look at how rabid players are with transmog — it’s because that’s pretty much the only way that the game allows them to express creativity and visual personality. Proper player housing in WoW could have been that to the nth degree."