Ever since the contentious, heavily scrutinized launch of World of Warcraft's seventh expansion, Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard has seemingly had a difficult time retaining good faith from its fans. Alongside Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard struggled to create interest in Diablo Immortal, Diablo's debut onto mobile devices, and the slow, arduous death of their tepidly popular MOBA, Heroes of the Storm only impacted Blizzard's back catalog of games. Whatever chance Blizzard had at regaining faith, after the release of Warcraft III's remaster, was nearly completely gone. Because of this, World of Warcraft's eighth expansion, Shadowlands, could be of greater importance than any other expansion before it.
Blizzard Entertainment, a subsidiary of Activision, is at a strange precipice in the games industry. On one hand, they are one of most influential and well-known PC developers. On the other hand, Blizzard has struggled to create anything well-received in multiple years. Even Overwatch, the FPS that became Blizzard's poster child during the latter half of the past decade, has a sequel coming that has yet to drum up any notable excitement.
Shadowlands, then, being the eighth part of Blizzard's longest-running title, has an odd weight on its shoulders. Not only is it something that should, for many fans, be a return to form for Blizzard, but it is also Blizzard needing to rebound after their weak past few years. Shadowlands is primed to be a unique departure for World of Warcraft, showcasing the MMORPG's most high-fantasy elements as players venture into the afterlife, dominated by Covenants who hide insidious conflicts, rueful mysteries, and perilous monsters.
What World of Warcraft's Covenants Are
Each Covenant in World of Warcraft dominates their respective zones that the user will explore, aiding them in their copious problems, and ultimately choosing one of them in the end. Committing to a Covenant is one of the core features of Shadowlands, as World of Warcraft's lead director, Ion Hazzikostas, has reiterated in his interviews. Bringing back the "RPG" in MMORPG has been the focus of Blizzard's team, as they want to tie player choice (and agency) to impactful gameplay moments.
Each Covenant in World of Warcraft, beyond simply having unique lore, cosmetics, and stories to play through and earn, has character power tied to them. They come with class-specific abilities that enhance one's damage, healing, or tanking capabilities as well as utility abilities that give the player a large shield, more movement, a teleport, and so on. While this sounds engaging in theory, many users and influential content creators have immediately pointed out Blizzard's iffy history with class balancing as well as the undeniably challenging road ahead of them.
Balancing over forty unique abilities alongside class-specific effects is challenging as is, but Blizzard has other systems in World of Warcraft that may affect the outcome even further. Unique legendary items that must be crafted majorly impact the player's moment-to-moment gameplay, and on top of that, conduits must be slotted into a secondary talent tree which provides passive effects. Some may call this bloat; an unneeded focus on secondary systems which, if one were to go by Blizzard's recent track record, will be removed in favor of other systems in the following expansion.
Why Covenants May Be A Problem In WoW: Shadowlands
However, the more pertinent threat to balance is the restrictive nature of Covenant abilities, and how Blizzard's focus may be short-sighted. One important element of a player's enjoyment in an MMO is their agency to pick and choose their playstyle. One picks their class, their weapons, their talent-build, and so on. Each player can utilize unique builds for certain situations. If something requires more directed, single-target damage they will alter their talent choices accordingly. Other situations may require abilities and passive traits that deal with multiple targets more effectively.
Covenants, while swappable, require the player to progress through all the story and unlocks once more. And, if a World of Warcraft player wishes to rejoin their prior Covenant, they must work even harder to regain what they had lost. Throughout the alpha and the currently running beta for Shadowlands, Covenants are far from balanced. Certain classes benefit from only one of the four choices.
Unfortunately, and ironically, World of Warcraft Covenants present an immediate threat to player agency. While it's admirable that these kinds of agency-driven changes are focused on by Blizzard, there are two glaring flaws in them. World of Warcraft is a multiplayer game. Losing out on character power in favor of other elements may be understandable in a single-player RPG, but in a multiplayer game, many users are scrutinized for their performance in harder content. Raids, in particular, require peak performance from the roster.
How Blizzard Is Balancing WoW's Covenants
Certain abilities may be excellent for single target encounters, but they are far worse in multiple-target encounters. Others are the opposite. This means that World of Warcraft players could find themselves benched on certain fights, not due to bad performance, but simply because they made the "wrong" choice. Even more concerning is that so many users have expressed frustration with the inability to experiment with all the unique abilities, especially considering most players could simply look up the "best" all-around World of Warcraft ability online. It winds up not being much of a fun choice, but rather a tough decision one must make to commit themselves to one form of content. If a player wants to do both PvP and PvE optimally, they will no longer be able to.
Blizzard has vowed to persistently balance World of Warcraft's Covenants, but that leaves fans extremely skeptical. Certain players think back to Legion, when complex systems were balanced so constantly that it forced users out of utilizing their specialization properly. Others think back more recently, as Battle For Azeroth launched with a similar character-power driven system titled Azerite traits, which continue to only have one or two viable choices for most specializations. Others think back as recently as earlier this year when Blizzard released the corruption system during the final patch of Battle for Azeroth. A system that was, and continues to be, unbalanced and random. Many players questioned how such a system made it through Blizzard's quality assurance, let alone be allowed to launch in that state.
Faith in the company is at an all-time low, and for good reason. Blizzard's history of balance isn't great, and Covenants may be their greatest challenge. While this system will likely not make-or-break the game for some (although for some competitive users it might) it doesn't bode well for World of Warcraft's future. It has been many months since the expansion's alpha launch, and ever since then, testers have expressed their concern over Covenants. Hazzikostas has reassured some by saying that if all goes wrong, they could always "pull the ripcord," suggesting that they could, if needed, give all four abilities to the players to pick from and change whenever they want.
Now in Beta, balance has still not been solved and World of Warcraft: Shadowlands' launch is barely two months away, in late October. Many long-time fans and critics have begun to chant, on Twitter, on Reddit, on all social media: Pull the ripcord. The chance of Covenants launching in a balanced state is very low, and the safer option would be to give players what they want. Blizzard remains stubborn. It has been months since they have last addressed this worry.
Perhaps most upsettingly, World of Warcraft Covenants are by no means something even casual players are fawning over. If this were a controversy between hardcore players and casual, Blizzard's stubbornness could be well-founded. That simply isn't the case. One cannot fathom a casual player not enjoying four unique abilities (instead of just one they may not even enjoy), and this malleability is mandatory for high-end experimentation without forcing people to create four of the same character. By opening Covenants up, Blizzard wouldn't be hurting anyone, meanwhile restricting them would undoubtedly be harming many.
Certain players find this infuriating because in many ways Blizzard has been better than ever in Shadowlands. The expansion as a whole is looking rife with content and, surprisingly, very conscious of the player's criticism. Blizzard has, undoubtedly, fixed many of World of Warcraft's most recent ailments, and yet they seem ignorant about Covenants. The launch of Shadowlands looms overhead, and for long time fans, this may be Blizzard's final test.
World of Warcraft is available now on PC and Mac.