Found out about the free gametime weekend, so I decided to check it out. I just did the prepatch questline.
Upon logging in, you are immediately put into a 5 minute long recap cinematic. You get... how many names and terms thrown at you? Dark Titan Sargeras? Colossal blade? Magni Bronzebeard? Speaker? Cries of Azeroth? Mad Titan? N'zoth? Xal'atath? Cursed blade? Old Gods? The Shadowlands? Anduin Wrynn? Domination magics? Primal Dragon Iridikron? Titans? The Dark Heart? Radiant Song? Alleria Windrunner? The Harbinger? The engimatic Locus-Walker? Void Lord Dimensius? And on and on it goes. I felt like I was starting War of Dragons (the 20th season of Pili) on Netflix. Massive info dump of years and years of different storylines. Now I have been following the Warcraft story, but even for me it reeks of a soap opera that has been going on for 20+ years and is near impenetrable to outsiders.
We then get another janky ingame cutscene. For a billion dollar game that charges $205 to play per year and is Blizzard's golden goose, and the Worldsoul Saga that was marketed on the merits of its story to rival the competition, it is disappointing they didn't step up their cutscene game. Come on Blizzard. You're capable of better. Or was. Where did the people who made their hours and hours of in-engine Starcraft 2 cutscenes go?
Then we have the actual event. I had heard about lag, but flying around killing the mobs was pretty smooth, though I had no idea what I was doing. I was supposed to turn stuff in? To what? The pylons? I clicked on the pylons, but the bar at the top of the screen didn't seem to go up, so IDK if I contributed. So I just killed more blue things. Then Onyxia spawned. And then it happened. The lag. Holy crap, I have never experienced that level of lag in WoW before. Literally stuck for 15+ seconds unable to input anything. Trapped. I don't know what is wrong with retail WoW. This wasn't an issue when wagging 100+ player battles during MoP and before, and it isn't an issue when participating in the humongous WvW battles in GW2 or the meta events there where you have a hundred players all fighting a dragon and lots of adds at once. FF14's world bosses have some lag, as in 1 or 2 seconds, not literally 15 seconds of none of my inputs registering!
I was somewhat interested in getting the two remembered Wyvern/Gryphon mounts, but I will wait for possible server engineering improvements before doing those events again. In the mean time, I've gone back to anima farming at Zereth Mortis, now conveniently empty with almost all of the rares up for me. Good time to get that Kyrian minigame upgraded to level 2, do the achievement, and then buy that Gruesome Flayedwing rylak mount for my Frost DK I raised on MoP remix (I actually want the Rajani Warserpent for him as his flying mount, but I gave up on camping that rare for its 1% droprate mount when you have to also compete with other people for it).
