While World of Warcraft Shadowlands was a triumph upon release, as the hype died down, Team Liquid content creator, Caroline ‘Naguura’ Forer, discusses the difficulties of streaming the divisive WoW expansion on Twitch.
World of Warcraft’s most recent expansion, WoW Shadowlands, promised an expansive world thrown into chaos at the hands of longtime antagonist, Sylvanas Windrunner, and otherworldly entity turned Thanos-style villain, the Jailer.
For many within the game’s playerbase, however, it did anything but. Plagued by unpopular narrative choices and slow responses to community feedback, a lack of substantial content pushed Twitch stars like Asmongold and Preach Gaming to make their way to the shores of Final Fantasy XIV’s Eorzea and Lost Ark‘s Arkesia, making these new worlds their home.
Amid Azeroth’s exodus was Team Liquid content creator and Twitch sensation, Naguura, who even branched out to the likes of Valorant and League of Legends to sate her gaming needs.
Naguura reflects on WoW Shadowlands’ Twitch journey
While once upon a time Naguura told Dexerto “I just love everything about Shadowlands,” unfortunately as time went on and the wait between patches grew exponentially, her interest slowly began to wane.
“I was actually pretty disappointed in Shadowlands,” she laments. “At the start I was so excited; everyone was excited for Shadowlands! It looked like a great idea, it had all these Covenants, and everything seemed like it was going to be a success.”
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Unfortunately, as global affairs began to dictate the game’s development “patches were delayed and delayed, so people lost interest, and the patches that came out were also not as exciting… I do think a big portion of Shadowlands wasn’t as successful as it could have been.
“For me as a streamer, I lost interest in WoW for quite a lot of time,” she continues. “I just completely stopped playing WoW for months after [patch] 9.1 came out and was kind of a disappointment. So I ended up playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV – which I loved, by the way. I also looked into Lost Ark, which I’m also enjoying a lot. It seems like nowadays there’s just seems like there’s all of these other MMOs nowadays that get more attention because of this content drought that happened in Shadowlands.”
Despite what may sound like doom and gloom for WoW’s Twitch lifecycle, Naguura believes WoW “will always have its place on Twitch because of people who come back to the game because it has a consistent, competitive endgame content that other MMOs don’t have.”
As the PvP scene continues to flourish and will no doubt continue to thrive in the next WoW expansion, it’ll be interesting to see whether or not fresh blood can rejuvenate Azeroth’s age-old story and transform it into a Twitch behemoth like Lost Ark.
Either way, as the veil thins around what’s coming next for our cast of heroes and villains, we can count on Naguura diving back into the fray once more.