World of Warcraft / Franchise Original Sin

The Horde/Alliance Conflict Ball:
- The fact that every expansion feels the need to justify the two factions fighting each other instead of together is one of the most consistently criticized elements of the game, but has existed since Classic, where several battlegrounds existed that allowed for the two factions to fight for resources. It was forgiven though because there wasn't an enemy menacing the very existence of the world that would justify the Horde and Alliance banding together, plus due to the Excuse Plot nature of the game during Classic, it was clearly more a gameplay reason than a story one, which was repeated for Burning Crusade. After Burning Crusade though, the writers began to try and give narrative reasons for why the two were feuding, starting with the infamous Wrath Gate in Wrath of the Lich King. Though criticized, the conflict from that point to Mists of Pandria was centered around one continuous conflict, and it was mostly understandable why it started and was going on because of the hot-tempered leaders of both faction (Varian and Garrosh). When Legion had the two factions again fighting each other for less justified reasons than the Wrath Gate incident, it was widely criticized for being pointless, but people generally ignored it because the two factions still did at least work together in the end. Battle For Azeroth reignited the conflict again and made it the main draw of the expansion, people finally had enough and it became clear that the writers were doing it for no reason besides to justify why the two factions remain separated.
- Related to this is the tendency to cast the Horde in the role of villain and the Alliance in the role of hero. This made perfect sense in the first two games when the Alliance was fighting off a demonically-compelled Orc invasion, but that excuse no longer applies in III and later. Despite this the writers repeatedly have the Horde seemingly backsliding into mindless aggression and viciousness while the Alliance defense flounders before rallying with the aid of defecting Horde. Each time a conflict ends it becomes harder to accept that the Alliance wouldn't finally do something to permanently end a threat that has yet again massacred innocent civilians, and has produced antagonists who continually threaten the safety of the world.
Retcons related:
- Retcons started with Warcraft III (and the Warcraft Expanded Universe) where the orcs are suddenly revealed to be not Always Chaotic Evil and the Dragons are divided into Dragonflights. These didn't contradict established canon (for the most part) so were accepted (and especially at the time, the advent of "Warcraft Orcs" was seen as a welcome step forward toward avoiding Unfortunate Implications). Likewise, while the Draenei/Eredar connection caused some controversy, it slid by, as they were minor characters before resurfacing as a playable race in The Burning Crusade (and many would admit that Chris Metzen had a point when he asserted that the retcon did give the previously-flat Eredar, and the Legion as a whole, some much-needed pathos, depth and world-grounding, which was a lot more necessary for a prolonged, serialized narrative like WoW's as opposed to the one-shot narratives of the RTS titles). Following this, though, the retcons just got more and more obvious as time went by, to the point where Warlords of Draenor rewrote almost the entirety of Draenor's backstory. It got so bad that Blizzard had to make Warcraft Chronicle to even attempt to compile everything into one coherent timeline to ensure this wasn't an issue, and even still retcons are a thing after the books were finished.
- Shadowlands was heavily criticized because of the large amount of retcons that retroactively made the fan-favorite story of Warcraft III worse, and felt unnecessary for the current story. While there were many questionably decisions in Shadowlands, this was not the first time such a retcon was made in a way that damaged prior games. Warlords of Draenor involved travelling to an alternate timeline where alternate versions of characters from the Old Horde could be encountered by players. Later, in 6.2, the Burning Legion invades alternate Draenor, and previously-defeated demons (such as Archimonde and Mannoroth) are encountered as well. At that point, this posed no problem, as it was assumed that those demons were merely alternate versions of the ones killed in Warcraft III (just as the orcs), and their appearance there didn't affect their previous defeat in Warcraft III. However, Legion later established that the Burning Legion exists across all timelines and the demons in Warlords of Draenor were the same as the ones in Warcraft III, they just were back because of a Resurrective Immortality natural to demons - and immediately proved it by bringing back pretty much every named demon in Warcraft III and previous expansions (well, except for Malganis). This retroactively turned the battle in Mount Hyjal at the end of Warcraft III much more of a hollow victory. In Warcraft III, many sacrifices had been made, many things had been lost, but it still felt that it had been worth it because a big blow had been dealt to the Legion by killing several of their top commanders (including Archimonde himself). After the retcon, however, it's revealed that the Legion suffered no long-term damage after the battle, however, and it could only be counted as an Azeroth victory in the sense that the races of Azeroth weren't killed right there - which to some people may hurt the moment where all the races of Azeroth unite together in the final battle.
While the Legion expansion is critically praised on a gameplay level, its story was divisive for including the controversial deaths of several major characters. The series' habit of Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome can be spotted in Cataclysm in which Magni Bronzebeard was turned into diamond in a futile attempt to save his people, and Cairne Bloodhoof was killed in a duel by Garrosh unwittingly using a poisoned weapon. Magni's functional death was seen as a worthy way to go out (and more to the point, it was done cleverly enough that there was a plausible "out" if they wanted the character to come back, which he did in Legion), and it led to plot development in the form of a Succession Crisis subplot, along with Character Development in other characters including that of which Anduin and Varian settle their differences. Come Legion, and several characters that could've made interesting storylines, such as Vol'jin who just became Warchief in Pandaria and spent most of Draenor off-screen, as well as Varian whose High King subplot was left unresolved, or are brought out of the woodwork such as Ysera and Tirion, dropped like flies with little to no impact on the overall plot. This gave the playerbase the idea that the writers are simply piling on death just for the sake of piling on death.
- It goes back farther than that, as the RTS games that founded the Warcraft universe had a tendency to kill off the previous game's characters either between games or during the campaign. Anduin Lothar, Grom Hellscream, Uther the Lightbringer, Gul'dan (kind of), Orgrim Doomhammer, Terenas Menethil, Daelin Proudmoore... The difference is that the deaths of these characters were often major story moments that had entire missions or campaigns centered around them and the consequences of their deaths, while those that came after tended to come across as dropped bridges.
A big problem over a decade into the game's life is that so much of the design changes so much every expansion, particularly when it comes to classes getting a revamp. A class that's in a good place one expansion, will have a different set of abilities and expectations next expansion, and might suddenly be seen as bad, leading to many to be afraid of what will happen to their favorite characters every time. This has actually been happening since the very beginning of the game; Paladins got a major revamp right around when the game came out, so no testing had been done on it. The difference is, the early revamps fixed things like the untested paladin or specs that simply could not function at the endgame and got things in a favorable place by Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King at the latest. The trend has simply continued, whether or not it has fixing something that was broken, meaning classes randomly change without any reason to them, resulting in some classes having such radical roles between patches.
The system bloat outside of the character progression. Starting with the Garrison in Warlords of Draenor, each expansion includes a system or set of systems that define the experience. Warlords suffered heavily due to this as the development of the Garrisons drained resources that would otherwise have gone into developing content and bug fixes, ultimately resulting in an expansion that was largely bare of content. This has come up as an issue to one degree or another in the expansions since then, either due to overcomplicated systems hindering game experience or draining resources from other areas in need of development, and it's made worse when those systems get completely scrapped at the end of the expansion that introduced them in order to make new room for the new system that replaces them, as it means that all the time that was spent developing the old system amounts to nothing when working on the new expansion. Legion introduced AP, a type of currency unique to each expansion which is critical to end-game and character progression: players were not happy at the idea that they would need to be grinding AP constantly in order to keep up and it also proved a major hindrance for alts which would constantly be AP-starved. And then, Shadowlands gave two different systems: renown and anima. Although only the former directly influenced player power (the latter being more oriented towards cosmetics), players were by then sick of having so many grinds and overcomplicated systems (especially the more casual players, who may not have trouble gearing for raiding, but do have trouble finding time to do the grind), and demanded a return to a simpler progression. It got so bad that one of the main selling points when announcing Dragonflight was that there wouldn't be another of those systems.
The Designated Hero faction leaders have been one of the longest issues fans have had at times with the game, as it can be hard to feel like the story pushing certain characters in a direction to be earned. Fandral Staghelm back in Vanilla was the first real example of this issue, being a fairly racist and hostile Night Elf who is portrayed as a Tragic Villain. Still, the fact that only Night Elves had to deal with him made it easy to tolerate him, and he was treated even In-Universe as wrong as time went on, showing the writers understood they were better off letting him be treated as wrong for his actions. But people really started complaining when Wrath of the Lich King came out and brought Varian Wrynn, the ex-lost King of Stormwind, as many players hated his dislike of the Horde and general attitude. Then Garrosh became Warchief, Trade Prince Gallywix got to be a Karma Houdini, while the previously likable Baine began to be portrayed as a coward who punished Crime of Self-Defense. From Wrath onward, Blizzard began trying to push certain characters as heroes in spite of the community disagreeing, and each expansion includes at least someone with this issue.
The repeated use of Face–Heel Turn. First notable in Warcraft III with Medivh, Arthas, and Grom, small hints of this were present in vanilla World with Green Dragons tainted by the Nightmare and some minor lore characters. Burning Crusade in an attempt to make its dungeons and raids compelling to RTS players chewed through notable lore characters such as Illidan, Kael'thas, and Zul'jin, often with little explanation beyond that they either went insane or made a deal with the current Greater-Scope Villain. This became a recurring issue for the game as many well-known characters were converted into quickly dispatched bosses to create content rather than keeping them on to develop story.
Many expansions for World of Warcraft like Burning Crusade and Mists of Pandaria drew criticism for having large amounts of Horde heroes fall victim to suddenly becoming evil and abruptly dying afterwards. The thing is similar happened early as Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, where two Horde heroes betrayed their faction and died at the end of their campaign. The difference was both characters Gul'dan and Cho'gall, eventually turning traitor, was heavily foreshadowed in the manual and the games were much less character focused back then.
The sheer amounts of faction reputation grinding. While it was present since the original (especially with the Hydraxxian Waterlords, which was required to progress through Molten Core), it became despised when every other expansion included a bunch of factions to grind with, especially since progress was often locked behind a reputation gate.
- Even worse than progress being blocked, simple game mechanics like flight are rep-locked. Legion required entirely finishing all the story lines in all six zones, plus entirely finishing the class hall questline (which for people who don't raid was kind of difficult), and get Revered with six different factions, then wait another two or three patches until the other half of the achievement came out. At that point, you could then fly on all your characters. Battle for Azeroth did the same: explore all six zones, get Revered rep with six factions, one of which only has two or three quests a day, finish all the story quests for all three of your faction's zones and all eight of the storyline quests for the opposite faction's zones, do a hundred world quests... and then wait for 8.2 and reach Revered reputation with the two new factions introduced there (fortunately, one of which was pretty easy to grind rep with).
Flight in general seems to be something Blizzard wishes wasn't in the game. At first adding it seemed like a cool and logical progression, but the developers have since gone on record as saying they almost immediately regretted it because it completely destroys any control they have over player movement and just generally cheapens gameplay in every possible way. It's pointless to painstakingly design an enemy base for players to fight through when they can just drop from the skies on top of the boss without any trouble. Similarly, players are hardly in any danger when they can just take off and fly away from any threat. Creating interesting or impressive environments and zones at ground-level, much less any kind of obstacles like mountains or rivers, is irrelevant if players will be spending most their time soaring above them.
For this reason every expansion has featured Blizzard either trying to take flight away or keeping you from obtaining it until much later... which is something that hasn't been well received, because Blizzard started to get really serious about limiting flying at the same time (around Warlords of Draenor) that started a change in level design that requires flying to reasonably navigate, with sharp terrain, unclear paths that provide the only way to reach a place yet are hard to find without external sources,^note or overcrowded roads where you can't walk ten steps without being attacked by enemies.^note This is most noticeable in Highmountain in Legion and especially Nazjatar in Battle for Azeroth (which seems to have been designed with flying on mind, only flying wasn't yet available when Nazjatar was released), but can be found as back as Warlords of Draenor (the best way to see the change, is to compare Nagrand from Outland and Nagrand from Draenor).
The Night Elves' Badass Decay started all the way back with the transition from Warcraft III to World of Warcraft, where they went from being a faction in their own right just as powerful as the Alliance or the Horde to being a "mere" member of the Alliance, and suffered a few attacks at the hands of the Horde. It was forgiven back then because most of Kalimdor's Alliance content revolved around them, making it feel like they still had a presence (if not ownership) on the entire continent, and Warcraft 3's story ended with the elves sacrificing their immortality and Hyjal being blown up to stop the Burning Legion, so them being less powerful made some sense.
But when Cataclysm rolled out, to justify the Horde gaining more territories, the elves were shown as losing control of most of the zones they had before, without the victories to counterbalance it or explanations as to why they were less powerful. It became even worse in Battle for Azeroth, where the Night elves lose their capital, the few zones they had left, and nearly their entire population to the Horde, with their counterattack being a Pyrrhic Victory at best, and the bulk of the expansion's narrative being how Saurfang, the one partly responsible for it, feels about it.
Sylvanas Windrunner (and by extension, her Forsaken) has always been a weird character to have within the Horde, straddling the line between Nominal Hero and Token Evil Teammate of the Horde, with her very first act when freed from the Lich King being to ally with the survivors of Lordaeron then, once they were of no use to her, murder them all before giving a speech that was villain-like, and the entire faction engaging in vivisection, torture, research on the plague, lobotomization and the likes at least once per Forsaken quest hub. It was forgiven in Vanilla, because those quests ran on Black Comedy or happened to Asshole Victim like the Scarlet Crusade and the Scourge (plus having a clearly evil race for the Horde was one of the Forsaken's biggest appeals at launch). They were also counterbalanced by a large number of quests showing the Forsaken as a whole were afraid of Arthas coming back, many Forsaken were mistrusted, suffering and lost due to struggling with their freedom but being unable to see loved ones, and generally were Jerkass Woobie race desperate to find a sense of belonging.
But Cataclysm ramped up the Mad Scientist and Black Comedy vibes, removed most of the Asshole Victims (the Scourge and Scarlet Crusade were nearly extinct at that point), leaving the Forsaken and Sylvanas to feel more and more like villains who were due for their comeuppance any moment now rather than misunderstood Anti Heroes. Sylvanas herself was compared to the Lich King, even In-Universe, and was seemingly set up to become a Big Bad soon (with Drek'Thar, a wise old orc shaman, refusing to help her after her atrocities and the Andorhal questline showing Sylvanas raising dead Alliance soldiers to fight their former comrades and then imprisonning and torturing Koltira for not wanting to kill his best friend as the two biggest examples she was due to be the Big Bad). Then in Legion, despite being named Warchief, Sylvanas's first act was to go in Stormheim to attempt to enslave an angel goddess after making a pact with Helya. Battle For Azeroth ramped it even further, making Sylvanas into an Omnicidal Maniac, before attempting to allay it by having her leave the Horde entirely... only for Shadowlands to ramp up the critiques even further by attempting to redeem Sylvanas by essentially making her actions "not her fault" through retcons and sudden twists with no build up.
The presence of exclusive campaigns started back in Legion with class halls: a place exclusive to players of a specific class, with a questline only that class would see, and offering perks only that class would earn. At the time, it was very well received, because it improved class identity (which is something that players had been complaining that had been forgotten during the last years), and was something quite new to the game. However, it had some problems, such as not all class campaigns being of the same quality (Death Knight and Rogue usually coming up on top, and Monk and Priest on bottom), and making content inaccesible to most players (in particular, the reveal that the misunderstanding between Horde and Alliance on Broken Shore was something deliberately invoked by the Legion, is a big plot point that shouldn't have been restricted to a rogue-only questline) which meant you needed to have an army of alts if you wanted to experience all the content.
Battle for Azeroth repeated it with the war campaigns, two campaigns this time centered about the two factions. The complaint about uneven quality was repeated (there are four full CGI cinematics dedicated to Saurfang's story, while the Alliance via Anduin only has very brief appearances in two of them), but it was tolerated because WoW had always had faction-specific questlines (although there was a feeling that players needed to play both sides to understand what was going on) and it reduced the number of characters one needed to understand the full story to just two. However, Shadowlands introduced covenants, four equivalents of class halls that could be chosen to join. They were extremely badly received, for several reasons. One, there was no real reason for covenants being exclusive, as opposed to class halls and factions previously, with no lore reason as to why a player can't join all four covenants other than "Blizzard wants to have exclusive campaigns again". Two, while class halls and war campaigns were mostly for story and cosmetics, with little (if any) influence on player power, covenants had several systems that were specific to each of them and heavily influenced player power (conduits, soulbinds and special abilities), which means players who wanted (or rather, were forced by raid leaders) to min-max were required to join a specific covenant to be able to raid - not helped by switching covenants being heavily restricted for most of the expansion.
The AP grind: a form of currency that can be acquired from several sources, but must be farmed because, at several thresholds, the character gains levels, and upper levels give several bonuses directly related to player power - essentially a second barrier for raiding in addition to gear. First seen in Legion, where it was tolerated because it was tied to legendary artifacts, which were something completely new, and most of them were lore-important Legendary Weapons that players were excited to be wielding. There were some complaints (they required a huge grind, not only for alts, but for each spec), but overall it was well-received. Later, Battle for Azeroth introduced the Heart of Azeroth, which was the same except it wasn't new and it didn't have the lore significance that artifacts had. Even though the grind was a bit smaller (AP was now shared among all specs of a class), players didn't like several aspects of it, such as gear upgrades being unable to reach their full power if the AP grind wasn't high enough.
At the end of Shadowlands, the Jailer reveals that his actions were an attempt to unify the world to defeat a greater threat, a plot point that did not go down well at all with the fanbase. However, this has actually been a theme going back to almost the earliest days of World of Warcraft. Almost every villain has turned out to be either the pawn of some greater, more powerful villain, or a Well-Intentioned Extremist who was working against them. However, in earlier expansions, these were well-established characters working with or against preexisting threats. The Jailer, however, did not exist at all prior to Shadowlands, and what bit of characterization he did receive through the course of the expansion was shallow and flat. Also, absolutely nothing is known about the "threat" he was supposedly working against. Finally, all of this was only revealed at the very end during his Final Speech, making it feel even more like an ass-pull. He was built up to be the most dangerous thing in the setting. For players to be told, once again, that the "greatest threat" they were fighting against was actually working against something even worse (a plot "twist" already pulled many times before) finally broke many people's patience.
The blood elves siding with the inhuman Horde over their Tolkienesque Alliance of old has been a contentious topic ever since The Burning Crusade... a whole five years after the blood elves' original split from the Alliance in favor of the inhuman Illidari in Warcraft III.

Franchise Original Sin / World of Warcraft

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