Dragonflight had its 10.1 patch the other week, which added a new zone to the Dragon Isles, the Zaralek Cavern. I have to admit I was a bit suspicious of having an underground zone in an expansion about riding dragons, since those things seemed kind of thematically at odds with each other, but the cave is huge and you don't really feel boxed in at all.
In fact, I was very impressed that this addition, too, has been integrated into the Dragon Isles seamlessly. I thought that this one would require a loading screen for sure, but nope! The tunnels into the cavern wind back and forth a couple of times, presumably to give the game time to load all the assets, but aside from a little error message that currently pops up when you go through, the transition between underground and overground is seamless. There are even entrances to the cavern at several different points of the map, to add to that feeling of it really being right underneath the zones we already know.
The main storyline also continues, and it was nice to actually be caught up for a change (the husband and I took forever to complete the base campaign because of how much of it was tied to hitting certain renown levels with some of the factions and just a general feeling that it was a bit all over the place). After all the moaning people did about how terrible they thought Shadowlands' writing was, I've seen relatively little discussion of the Dragonflight story, and in a way that's a shame because I think it's quite good. It reminds me of the Jaina story in BfA at times in the sense that the characters feel a bit more mature and like their reactions to events are more nuanced and not as cartoonish. During one of the recent chapters I actually said to the husband: "What is this, everyone acting like adults and actually apologising after saying something stupid?"
Plus, I actually just... care? I said during Shadowlands that I still found its story entertaining, but it was a bit like a soap opera where you're kind of laughing at how ridiculous everything is. Dragonflight doesn't feel that way, and there've been several story beats that have actually made me feel things, most recently the attack on Loamm. It's good stuff.
In terms of activities, Blizzard seems to have managed to find a good balance between world quests, regular quests, and limited-time events, and they continue to add more content following that formula. There's a lot of new mini events in particular on the Zaralek Cavern map, often quite small in scale, but they can be fun to hop in and out of.
On the surface there are now also Fyrrak assaults, which seemed to be super bugged during the first week but seem to mostly have been fixed now. Sometimes Fyrrak just flies over the zone, yells a lot and burns a bunch of people, as a throwback to Deathwing scorching whole zones during Cataclysm. You can tell the primal incarnates are a lot less powerful than the old Earth-Warder though, because when he caught my demon hunter fighting a rare, she actually survived the burn and didn't get the achievement, only dying to the mob she was fighting moments later due to how much her health pool had suddenly been depleted.
I keep thinking how much of a shame it is that Dragonflight doesn't seem to have been a big financial success (by Blizzard standards) when it gets so much right. Is this how people felt during MoP, which a lot of people hated because of the pandas but which seemed to get a lot of praise in retrospect? Mind you, I did play at least for a few months during MoP and I think Dragonflight is better than MoP so far...
I have to admit that it's slowly transforming my attitude toward retail. Whenever I log in and start playing, I find it easy to keep going for hours because there's just always something fun to do, and of course there are now also the weekly dungeon runs with my mini guild to keep me busy. It's not a replacement for Classic or SWTOR, but I'm increasingly seeing it as pretty damn decent in its own way.
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I can't discuss anything regarding how Mists is perceived now, but my memories are all about the botting, the Alliance getting pummeled in Battlegrounds to the point where I couldn't enjoy anything outside of a 40 person BG, and the toxicity of dungeon runs to where I think I ran maybe 4-5 normal dungeons total the entire expansion. I also remember the incredible upscaling in gear where if you were leveling a fresh toon and you got to L85, the quest greens and whatnot you had on were so below what you needed in the entry zone in Mists that it was a struggle to even get some of the basic quests done. And if you were like me and spent most of the first year leveling that new toon, by the time you reached Pandaria the leveling zones were a ghostland. Which, when I commented on it back in 2013, was told that it was like that a month after release. So when I hear people disparaging Warlords of Draenor because players spent all their time in their Garrison, I have a hard time feeling any sympathy because they obviously weren't spending all of their time out in Pandaria during that expac. (And that's the same way in Wrath Classic right now, too; outside of some miners and herbalists, the leveling zones in Northrend are really empty whenever I poke my nose in on some of my alts.)
ReplyDeleteFrom my perspective, if people are actively out doing things in the world, then Dragonflight is already more successful than Mists. One thing I will comment on that maybe you can enlighten is that more than once in the past week we've had people in Gen Chat in Classic Era comment about how they left Retail because nobody was interacting or talking in Gen Chat in Dragonflight. At least in Era, they've discovered that random players actually communicate with each other. Since you play both Era and Retail, can you comment as to the accuracy of these statements?
That's an interesting question about general chat because it's not something I ever thought about. I usually dislike general chat in most MMOs and tend to hide it, but I haven't had to do so in era or retail, because it's mostly pretty quiet. People mostly seem to talk in guilds or custom channels in either version of the game nowadays. I can't say I've perceived that as a bad thing.
DeleteAs far as communication in retail goes in general, a lot of the content is very fast-paced and designed to not need any talking, so people don't bother. I do think people step up if the content requires it, but I don't really have much experience in that regard; I just remmeber being positively surprised by how helpful people were in LFR.
LFG on Bloodsail is pretty active, but it’s all about group forming, with little extraneous talk. On the live servers I peek in on (Blackwater Raiders, Earthen Ring, Proudmoore, Wyrmrest Accord…) things are oddly quiet in Trade Chat. Atheren
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