Asmongold criticizes Blizzard’s handling of World of Warcraft’s recent expansions

Asmongold, a well-known MMO and variety streamer and a candid critic of Blizzard’s management of World of Warcraft, has recently expressed his dissatisfaction with Blizzard’s handling of WoW’s two latest expansions, Shadowlands and Battle for Azeroth, reminding fans that Blizzard had previously mishandled other game expansions.

“I feel like people have to remember back in even The Burning Crusade and Vanilla WoW, Blizzard f**ked up so many things,” he said during a Twitch stream on June 26.

Although older expansions received positive feedback, he believed the developer company made critical mistakes from the start. “These games have been mismanaged ever since the beginning. It’s just that you might not have remembered them back then. “

Asmongold stated that they were distributed with glitched mechanical systems and other bugs that were fixed in later patches.

“People remember they played Burning Crusade, but they weren’t playing Burning Crusade. They were playing patch 2.4.3, I believe. But patches 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3 were different games. It took a long time to get to 2.4.3.”

Asmongold acknowledged that Wrath of the Lich King felt like the game’s genuine conceptual conclusion, and the performance of the expansions has since dipped.

Of course, as mentioned above, this is not the first time the OTK co-founder has expressed dissatisfaction with the company. The Twitch streamer isn’t afraid to criticize Blizzard’s games, frequently disagreeing with their design and gameplay choices. Asmongold has been an avid fan of the game. He began uploading World of Warcraft videos to YouTube in 2009 with the intention of providing walkthroughs and guides. His popularity grew gradually over time, but he didn’t begin streaming until 2014.

Zack currently has over 3 million Twitch followers, including approximately 28K live subscriptions, which places him among the top 20 Twitch streamers. He also has four YouTube channels with over 2.4 million subscribers. He streams and uploads videos to his channels almost on a daily basis, with his YouTube channel seeing double uploads per day.

Shadowlands and Battle for Azeroth

Following the seventh expansion pack, Battle for Azeroth, Shadowlands is the eighth expansion pack for the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. For many fans, Shadowlands was a huge letdown. While World of Warcraft’s core gameplay remains slick and enjoyable, it has gradually been suppressed by systems that appear to be out to overwhelm the experience.

Torghast, one of the main features of Shadowlands, quickly became a time-consuming annoyance that players were forced to complete weekly. For weeks, story content was sealed in order to complete daily and weekly checklists. Players felt trapped by Covenants and constrained by systems such as Conduit Energy, and despite community requests for change, the developer did not listen. Changes were ultimately made to those systems, but according to Asmongold, they’re far too late to matter.

Regardless of the criticism, Blizzard recently confirmed that the next expansion for World of Warcraft, Dragonflight, will be released this year. Most players are perplexed by this announcement and are concerned that a 2022 release date is too soon, with most pleading Blizzard to postpone Dragonflight and release the expansion in early 2023.

Asmongold initially expressed his excitement for the upcoming expansion after attending the Dragonflight official release event in April 2022. He is now skeptical — and other avid WoW fans should be as well.