So I'm not watching all this crap. What the hell is this game even about anymore? I watched the cinematic trailer and was more wtf than anything. Like instead of killing eachother like the roots of the game, now we summon the rainbow dragons and hugbox it up?
Warcraft used to be a gritty series made by ripped metalheads about bloodthirsty savages conquering civilizations and the survivors swearing oaths of vengeance.
Now that emasculated men and diversity hires are in charges, it's turned into a story about how you should forgive people who commit genocide on your race every 4 years.
Real talk: the dragon expansion is Blizzard scrapping the bottom of the barrel. In 2016, Blizzard had a dozen different expansion concepts they could have utilized.
- An underground expansion about cleansing Gnomergan, visiting Nerubian kingdoms, trawling through the dead old god Y'shaarj's dried up guts, meeting the Titan Azeroth herself, etc.
- A South Seas expansion about visiting the Goblin capital of Undermine, sailing to Kul'tiras and Zandalar
- A Rise of Azshara expansion about fighting the Naga and dealing with the elemental plane of Water (a subplot from Cata that ended on a cliffhanger that was never resolved).
- An expansion about going to Argus and liberating it and defeating the Burning Legion.
- An Emerald Dream expansion about fighting the Emerald Nightmare.
- An expansion about fighting the old gods.
But starting with Legion, Blizzard decided to throw away decades worth of expansion material in just 4 years. The very first raid of Legion is about defeating the Emerald Nightmare. Expansion material gone! Then the planet of Argus... was thrown away in a patch zone. Also, all of the Qiraji (Nerubians, Mantid, etc) are retconned into being dead, so there goes that (unless a new Qiraji kingdom we had never heard about is retconned in). And then you had Battle for Azeroth, which was sold as a Horde vs Alliance expansion... which also featured the players going to Kul'Tiras and Zandalar (which were just three zones each), and then Azshara was defeated in a patch, and then N'zoth was defeated in a patch.
They blew through 4 expansion concepts in just two years. That just left the Shadowlands as literally the only plotline left. Recent revelations suggest that the current lead writer, Steve Danuser (or Alex Afrasabi, I can't remember which), rushed through all of those plotlines that players had been invested in and anticipating for years/decades so he could get to his Shadowlands. Nobody liked it, and the backlash to the storyline was so bad that Blizzard has been delisting their videos (which is pretty funny when you then read interviews where the devs insist that their story is so great and that players want to see what happens next). Given how egotistical these people are on their twitter accounts, I wouldn't be surprised if this was done out of spite.
So Blizzard threw away all of their expansion material, but they can't shut down WoW because WoW and Hearthstone are literally the only games keeping Blizzard afloat. All of their other games were one time purchases (D1 remaster, D2 remaster, SC1 remaster, WC3 remaster), are either in maintenance mode (SC2, D3, HotS, OW1) or in development hell (D4, OW2, that new game they announced a few months back). So corporate mandates that WoW get a new expansion.
The Dragon Isles is an obscure name only hardcore WoW fans knew about. It was a concept for a vanilla zone that never made it into production (because they had more than enough zones and didn't need to spend time making more). The only concept art of it came from the 2005 WoW artbook. The name started popping up in recent years because there was literally no other expansion material left.
Page 140-141 of the Art of World of Warcraft (2005)
