Dragonflight expansion review
I will be reviewing Dragonflight for its RPG aspect. WoW has been a lackluster MMO for the past decade and Dragonflight does not change that. Unless you're diehard into doing the same raid or half dozen dungeons over and over again for months on end, then the only real question is whether or not the RPG - the questing content - of Dragonflight is good.
The expansion comes with five zones. The expansion's story begins in the Dracthyr starting zone, the Forbidden Reach, so that should be done first. You get to return to the Forbidden Reach later at level cap, where it exists as another lackluster immitation of Timeless Isle where you fly around in a zerg and kill rares for catchup gear. The Forbidden Reach is visually boring. It's just a desaturated, forested island with some mountains.
The story starts off engaging enough. The Dracthyr - the secret army of Neltharion aka Deathwing - wake from their stasis, and they have to fight a lost contingent of the Blue Dragonflight who are still acting under orders from Malygos, unaware that their leader died in 2008. Then the villains of the expansion are introduced, the Primalists, who want to revert the world back to before Titans altered it. Nothing amazing but the story moves quickly enough and the gameplay is engaging.
The next zone is the Waking Shore, the best zone in the expansion, with the turquoise rivers flanked by orange and green rock pillars to fly through. There is a little bit of mechanical depth here as one area of the zone is multilayered, with some mobs to fight and treasures on layers above that you have to fly to. The story keeps its momentum here, as you adventure with other preestablished characters, and with interesting Black Dragonflight drama towards the end.
There is also a small high fantasy area that has been twisted by the Primalists, which looks cool.
The new capital city is Valdrakken. I am not fond of the dragon's boring stone architecture that can be found through the expansion, but Valdrakken looks okay. The exterior looks great with the pink trees and the glass buildings and the dozens of NPC dragons flying around in the background against the pretty skybox. The interior of the Seat of the Aspect has some colorful stained glass.
The third zone, the Ohn'ahran Plains, is where the questing experience begins to fall apart. First, the environments are uninteresting. They're just plains to soar over. The story comes to a screeching halt, as you abruptly stop adventuring with the characters you were invested in trying to stop the Primalists, and instead start doing trivial stuff for centaur tribes. The Primalists eventually come back into the narrative, but you fight some random lieutenant nobody cares about, and I didn't really care the people I was fighting with. The only thing I really liked was the skybox.
The Azure Span is a visual improvement over the Plains, with tall trees to fly through, though it isn't multilayered like the Waking Shores was; there is no stuff up in the trees. There is a high fantasy area that rehashes the Crystalsong Forest/Borean Tundra with pink crystalized trees, but sadly it is very small.
Also, another cool high fantasy area twisted by the Primalists.
Sadly, the story continues to mostly suck here. The main character of this zone is Kalecgos, who sounds like a wimp. On that note, adventuring with wimpy NPCs is a running theme throughout this expansion. You feel like more of a babysitter trying to assauge pathetically insecure people rather than a badass hero who has spent 15 years slaining villains on a quest to save the world from another. The zone climaxes in a neat fixed camera battle.
The last levelling zone is Thaldrazus. Unfortunately most of the zone is untraverseable mountain cliffs that you can't land/walk on and would slide down to your death if you tried, so the actual playable area is quite small, taking place either in boring stone architecture, or in the Bronze Dragonflight's area. The Bronze Dragonflight's fortress looks a little cool, though it's another Temple of Karabor situation where you can't actually go through doors and explore inside.
Overall the environments look fine, but are blown away by the high fantasy setting of the previous expansion, which had islands floating in a sky dimension and with threads of anima floating overhead and hyperspace flightpaths.
As for the story, once again you have to put up with a wimpy NPC for most of the questline. However, the final stretch of the questline is cool, as you get to travel through time.
Once you finish Thaldrazus, you are then immediately directed to do the first raid, the Vault of the Incarnates. There is no meaty story to sink your teeth into like with MoP's or WoD's legendary questlines which began after finishing the levelling experience.
I completed the raid on normal difficulty. The raid takes place almost entirely in black and red underground caves, with only a couple rooms that look visually different. The boss fights I liked were the ice spider, and Dathea. I liked the ice spider fight because you are fighting her while ascending a spiral staircase, and she tries to yank you off of the staircase. The Dathea fight takes place on a circular platform (Boring!) but has you dodging the tornadoes that zip across the room, and then there is the part where you have to position yourself to get knocked off the platform to another platform to fight adds. The Raszageth fight was also sorta decent. The other boss fights were forgettable.
After you kill Raszageth, you are then directed to go back to the Forbidden Reach and do an hour long questline. The story is really bad. There is much drivel about "you chose compassion over violence" and etc. Sanctimonious cutscenes where they are whisper talking and having subtle facial gestures. It's trying too hard to be prestige television. These moments have not been earned. Up until now, Embebrthal has had a grand total of... a minute and a half of screentime across the entire levelling experience, including the Dracthyr starting zone. The game has not endeared me to Emberthal or has gotten me invested in... whatever is going on with him.
I still have no idea what is going on with the villain Sarkareth. In the Dracthyr starting zone, he shows up and then blurts out that he hates Neltharion and the Dragon Aspects for no reason I could decipher, and now he is trying to inspire Dracthyr by appealing to Neltharion's vision for them and wants to fulfill that. Maybe the writers have this grandiose storyline in their heads, but it's just not getting across through the game to its audience.
Once you finish the Forbidden Reach, that's it for story. Dragonflight's main story is 13 to 14 hours long. I had other issues with Dragonflight's narrative.
- I wasn't fond of Khadgar coming back for a 3rd expansion. If an old expansion NPC were to be brought back, I would have rather it had been Thrall, who would have actually had been relevant to an expansion about elemental magics and dragons given his role in Cata.
- You visit the Dragon Isles, but nobody acknowledges that there were three global disasters that should have affected them (the Cataclysm, the Legion invasion, and Azerite bursting out of the ground).
- There has ostensibly been a five year timeskip, but you certainly don't feel it. The only reminder was seeing Hemet Nessingwary being retired and driving wagon carts.
- Aggregate negative of sheer number of wimpy NPCs I had to put up with. It's like the people in Warcraft forgot how to speak authoritatively.
There are sidequests, but I found most of them to be boring and not worth doing, though they award rep so you mind as well do them anyway if you want to buy dragon customizations from particular factions. There were a handful of somewhat interesting sidequests, such as the one with the kids and the injured baby proto-drake, or the one with the old dwarf/dragon reminiscing about the old days.
That's Dragonflight's questing content. I didn't really enjoy them narratively, but I did like seeing the new zones and I like WoW's combat, so overall okay.
Soup event in Iskaara.
Dragonflight introduces a few GW2-styled events, though they are nowhere near as well designed or as enjoyable. The Storm's Fury event has you spend 10-15 minutes standing in front of a portal, mowing down endless mobs of enemies, and the end boss fight takes too long. The soup event in Iskaara boils down to running around buying stuff from NPC vendors for 15 minutes. Due to their length, the events are very exhausting. They are novel to check out once or twice, but I wouldn't do them again.
The Dragonriding is fun enough. It visually does not feel as good as GW2, where the flying mounts there had far more robust animations that sold the act of flying, whereas WoW's dragonriding mounts do not and have some pretty janky transistions. Also doesn't help that WoW does not have a dive button, so you can't see the picturesque horizon while descending; you have to angle your camera towards the ground. I played a Tauren, and 3 out of the 4 dragonriding mounts looked comically small, so I was forced to stick with the Proto-drake mount. Another issue with Dragonriding is that you can easily ascend however much you want. You can spam the ascent button 8 times in a row, so you can soar over the land below. It ends up feeling like boring old flying as the ground moves slowly below and the skybox above does not move. To really sell the feeling of flying, there should have been a world to fly through. Either restrict how high the player can ascend like in GW2 so that they actually fly through the environment (you do this in the Waking Shore before you have all of the Dragonriding talents unlocked), or add stuff high in the sky to fly through, like fleets of large airships, anima threads, floating islands, clouds, etc.
I like that when you mount your dragon, it flies down to you, though I wish it also flew away when you dismounted like in GW2, rather than the mount instantly disappearing. (WoW on top, GW2 below).
After you've finished the story, did the raid, and saw the event, your only options are to:
- Do the latest raid over and over for months on end, progressing through the difficulties from normal to heroic to mythic.
- Do the same half dozen mythic+ dungeons (the enemies have randomized abilities and you try to complete the dungeon as fast as possible) over and over again until the next expansion.
- Do PvP until you get bored. No, Dragonflight does not add any new PvP content.
- Unsub.
The soundtrack gets an F from me. Despite there being 5 hours of music, there were only two tracks from this expansion I liked were the
ukuele song from the first town in the Waking Shores, and
the Dragon racing song. There are a couple other songs I remember, such as the
Valdrakken inn theme (which is a remix of the dragon racing theme), or
Raszageth's theme, or one of the songs that plays in
the Forbidden Reach, but I wouldn't add them to my favorites. Otherwise, the rest of the music went in one ear and out the other. A far cry from the days of MoP and WoD where almost the entire soundtrack was full of bangers that I added to my favorite's playlist. I also listened to the OST outside of the game on Youtube. I tried to like it, but I couldn't.
Miscellaneous:
There has been a QoL improvement with the addition of Work Orders. If you wanted a crafted armor from an old expansion for transmog, or an old pet or a mount, etc, it was unlikely you would find it on the auction house, and if it was it was listed for ludicrous prices. You had to ask in trade chat hoping a crafter would bother with you. Now you can just acquire the mats and then put up a work order and tip 100 gold (you casually get thousands of gold from doing world quests so 100 gold isn't a big deal anymore), and all a crafter has to do is see the work order and press a button and its crafted.
Tauren players can finally transmog their two handed weapon to look like a log.
Trading post.
Another FOMO subscription retention gimmick has been added: the trading post. Every month, a NPC sells new stuff you can't otherwise get like new transmogs, collector's edition pets, quivers on your back, etc. You buy this stuff with a new currency that is easy to get (you get a monthly stipend, and can get more buy playing the game), but once the month is over, that stuff is gone.
I have been getting performance issues in the Dragon Isles, particularly Valdrakken. I have a Nvidia 3070 Ti, and I am getting 40-50 FPS. Historically WoW's performance sucks in foilage heavy areas such as Val'sharah, Suramar, or Ardenweald, but I'm getting 40-50 FPS being out in grass plains with no trees around like the Waking Shores or the Ohn'ahran Plains. The only reason I can think of for this is perhaps the game is rendering the entire Dragon Isles at once. Players are zooming around at 800% movement speed so perhaps there would be visually issues if zones were loaded as you got closer. I also had texture issues running the game with DX12 enabled, and had to take it down to DX11, which further decreased performance quality. Yes, my drivers were up to date and I did a scan of the game files.
I intend to remain subbed for another month to check out the 10.1 patch, which will introduce a new underground zone, new quests, and a new raid. Once I finish the story and beat the raid, I will unsub and probably won't come back until the 11.0 prepatch draws near to finish the story and do the raid will people are still doing it.
Overall, I'd say that if you like WoW's combat and pretty visuals, then check out the expansion. Maybe wait for a sale. If you don't like the gameplay then don't buy.
