It is well known that World of Warcraft has to be renewed after 18 years. Although the game engine, graphics, and mechanics have been constantly updated, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to follow the storyline itself, and because of this, many people considered the latest expansion, Shadowlands, to be rather a failure.
Thankfully, Dragonflight marks a return to what Blizzard does best: creating grounded worlds and storylines that make the project accessible and exciting.
Where Shadowlands focused on death, destruction, and the afterlife, and with all the bombastic philosophical themes that come with it, Dragonflight is the polar opposite. Here life is the focus, the pure joy of being, optimism and the desire to create a better world for our… well, the children of dragons. Of course, there’s still room for complexity, pain, and reminiscence. The mission “Stay a while” made people think about how the supposed “absolute evil” was dealt with.
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But let’s go back and start at the beginning. Here’s the launch trailer in case you haven’t seen it yet:
In Dragonflight we travel to the birthplace of the dragons of Azeroth, those who protect time and life itself. After several expansions in other parts of the universe, it’s actually quite comforting to come home (and hopefully for good this time).
I would recommend that you start the game as Drachtyr, the new Evoker class race. It only takes a couple of hours to get past the start area and this provides a lot better set-up for the story compared to what you get at the other races. It’s a race/class combination, so you can’t play the class with other races, so you can only play with the Drachtyr as an Evoker. It’s also a classic hero class, meaning you start at level 58 and, like all races that start neutral, have the option of joining either the Horde or the Alliance afterward. That being said, many previously impossible race and class combinations have been unlocked for other races. It makes sense in terms of fun, but maybe not in terms of world building, as a four-meter-long bull weighing 800kg might not be the most agile villain.
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The Drachtyr reside in one of the five zones on the Dragon Isles, but currently it doesn’t appear to be accessible in any other way. There’s a central city, as we’ve come to expect from other expansions, that acts as a neutral “hub” that all players can access. At first it seems like a fairly wide area, but very soon you unlock the dragons and with these beasts you can travel very long distances in no time, because they are much faster than your usual flying mounts. Unfortunately, they require timing and quick reaction when you see something of value in the distance. If you spend enough time collecting plants and iron ore, it’s not the easiest way to navigate. However, it is rumored that more conventional flying mounts will be unlocked “later”.
It might not be the expansion itself, but the various updates and changes that come with it that will make the biggest impact in the game. One of those features is a fully customizable user interface modeled after Star Wars: The Old Republic, which launched ten years ago. Another is a much more specialized crafting system that has the same complexity and options that we’re used to from modern MMOs. In other words, the internal structure of the main game itself has been extensively updated. The changes… you have to get used to it. I have mixed feelings: having three action bars seems a bit cluttered, but on the other hand it makes it easier for us to use functions associated with a specific hotkey. It’s hard to fault the graphical polish, however, and something as simple as higher resolution icons make the game feel a lot more up-to-date.
The skill tree has also been fundamentally revised and is now clearer. There are a lot of cool skills to choose from, but since you now have to spend skill points on different branches (each belonging to a different specialization), I sometimes feel like I have fewer options than before. It’s likely to strike a balance, but still…
On the other hand, the missions remain the same; some are good, some are passable and some are really boring. But it’s motivating, even for the most trivial quests, that the game introduces the expansion’s villain early on and develops the overall storyline in an engaging, albeit fairly predictable, manner.
While well done, the dungeons are also very similar to what can be found in Shadowlands, offering many interesting variations on well-known mechanics, each with a strong theme and design. The only thing is that I kinda wish they forgot to add the AOE spawn in boss fights because it’s still a nuisance when it comes to DPS.
I was one of those people who found Outland and Pandaria exciting and entertaining, and I feel the same way about Dragonflight. The way the storyline is introduced, often through supporting characters, makes the game world feel much more believable and grounded; a real place you want to explore and live in, not a random collection of quests and activities. It’s a big step in the right direction, and while I still have to get used to a lot of changes, I already feel at home in the world of Dragonflight.
