Quote Originally Posted by StriderShinryu View Post
Not necessarily on the lore front, though I'm sure there will be argument there as well, but I have a feeling this expansion/patch could be quite controversial. In many ways, it's very much NOT ShB while still very much needing ShB to have existed.
Agreed. I feel like ShB laid a foundation that they didn't decide to use in EW, opting to instead go with new construction. Frankly, if I didn't know better I would've assumed the story had been handled by someone else with a different vision than who wrote ShB, so the direction of EW was surprising. I was expecting and hoping for a continuation of moral greyness only to get black & white. I was telling a lore friend that it essentially killed most debate because the majority of the nuance that existed in ShB was stripped away in EW.

I think that EW was a good expansion on its own, but it was not the spiritual successor of ShB for me. Having said that, my favorite part of EW wouldn't have hit as hard as it did without ShB.