Walking Away From Dragonflight

Dragon Isles Continent Concept Art. Taken from Blizzard.

Well, I made a good call with not throwing around any promises. Kind of. Despite the fact that I was factually done with Shadowlands here, I've acknowledged that I never would be done with Warcraft franchise. At first, I planned to leave all of at the conclusion of Patch 9.2 post, but after some time it became apparent that there're more points to be addressed or reinforced. Do have a proper epilogue to this ordeal or rather "epilogue plus"... You know, it's funny. I'll elaborate on that remark later though.

That doesn't mean I would talk about anything directly related to Shadowlands, Sylvanas book and all of that stuff. I mean, they've clearly recycled all the unnecessarily fancy cutscene fluff from Reforged for two part Judgement and such. Good for you, Blizzard. Seriously, I don't think they reinvented the wheel here. That's not what they would've done here. Either way, without further interruption, let's just get to the remaining points.

Cringy Observations.

Back in a day, I persistently kept track of World of Warcraft news & development. Actively looking at tweets, articles, videos, etc. In recent years, it started to change and with Shadowlands I mostly given up. Not completely though, as I still briefly looked around every now and then. And one of the Discord servers I've been lurking in saw the resurgence in WoW related channels. While I scrolled through some discussions and links, something was pretty apparent. Something that wasn't really a secret before, but I just didn't knew how much it was true until that specific moment.

The community around World of Warcraft is totally, to put it lightly, insane. I'm talking about the two main parts of it, one of which I believe I brought up before. Let's call them "loyal whales" & "remaining doubters": one group still enjoys the game and tries to be on good terms of members of game's development team, while other ones consist of people that are simply tired of this mess and about to move on, if not already. While some people might point out which camp led me to this "surprising conclusion", my answer will actually blow their mind. It's not about specific portion of this community, but all of it.

I mean, how else would you describe it after seeing how a damn channel becomes a Twitter feed centered around "loyal whales"? Seeing this turn of events shows that "remaining doubters" share a few of similarities with other group. Both of them are obsessed with the game and its creators to a point where it might be not particularly healthy. Both of them are also obsessed with each other as if they're secretely in love with each other. Truth is that, while there're stupid people who think that being offensive and send death threats to those they despise, more civil members of said camps aren't perfect either.

"Whales" can't get enough of the franchise and mocking the opposite side. "Doubters" can't get enough of the franchise and mocking the opposite side. If loyal players are often might come across as victums of stockholm syndrome on the surface, critical players might be seen in different light in specific enviourment (such as aforementioned Discord server). Two crowds on high horses who can't see the double amount of mirrors surrouding them. Perhaps that wasn't something I actually wanted to waste my time on, but ultimately I'm kind of glad that I ended up conducting this "unplanned observation experiment".

Dragonic Inspirations.

Which leads us directly to the announcement of new expansion Dragonflight. I would like to start with somewhat positive points since I wish I was as enthusiastic as some other people seem to be. Besides, I think it's best to give anyone credit where its due. First of all, new designs for dragons themselves aren't exactly new. A few years ago Kiraser referenced a guide by Christopher Hayen, Senior Artist at Blizzard, focused on dragon's portrayal for Hearthstone: Descent of Dragons in his blog. That's just another instance of World of Warcraft team borrowing idea from other games made by the company and I would say that it doesn't stop there. Of course there's more to that.

"Good vs Evil" Concept by Christopher Hayen. Taken from Artstation.

In my quick observation, I've noticed that new look of gnolls on Dragon Isles look fairly similar to how Hogger was portrayed in Heroes of the Storm and eventually I began to appreciate his new look. Even though I am still not exactly a fan of that take on gnolls, it's not the worst case of "worgen-like" redesign: there's other candidate for it. As for the other Azerotian races that would take the spotlight in old-but-not-really land, they're alright. Not sold on centaurs, but Tuskarr, Titanic watchers and others are decent.

There's really nothing for me to say in terms of gameplay systems. Crossfaction was announced before new expansion and I don't have strong feeling for it. Besides the fact that it would probably make things easier for remaining roleplayers and all that stuff. I wasn't that invested in professions during my last Retail days, leaving me with little to no expertise on the little information they've revealed. New talent trees might be kind of neat. Revamp of Uldaman was a missed opportuniy in Cataclysm, so let's see where this goes now. As for the Dragon Isles themselves, there's a bit of "Exile's Reach" effect taking place here. Parts of it feel like something close to Warcraft, and it's clear that some artists still care about this franchise, which is bittersweet. However...

No Laugh, No Anger.

Although this expansion on paper supposed to be this grand return to franchise's roots with smaller scale story on Azeroth meant to appeal to Warcraft fans, Dragonflight just doesn't feel like that. It's not the matter of "World of Warcraft team isn't the same as it was in older days" since there's clearly some people in art team that still manage to get it right. Damn, maybe some sidequests would manage to shine similarly to Spires of Arak, Mechagon or Murky's storyline in Highmountain, for example. But the larger picture is still bleak and hollow.

Seeing Steve Danuser talking about dragons regaining their legacy and that word in particular being the theme of this expansion is amusing, knowing that major storylines related to that will likely start to bring currently excited people back to reality. New UI looks terrible, but even more so both forms of a new Dracthyr race. They're somewhere between "your average DeviantArt creation" and "help me unsee that Cats trailer" territory. Recycle of older skeletons for models is just silly. Makes you think that if they contributed to Deathwing going mad to a point he completely forgot about them since Dracthyr would be very useful to Netharian's experiments or creation of Chromatus. And why dragon buildings on Dragon Isles weren't seemingly created with dragon form in mind? Most of the views I've seen don't really fit for giant reptains. It's good to take care of drakonids and other dragon-esque races, but come on... Do I really care though?

Honestly? Not really. Again, this announcement left me indifferent to the current version of Warcraft. Reveal of Wrath of the Lich King Classic got a little chuckle out of me after the survey and the fate of Burning Crusade Classic, but I'm still not interested in those despite my nostalgia about those times when I played my Death Knight. I simply looked at what Blizzard will eventually screw up this time before walking out of the room.

Conclusion.

I'll cut it short here since I don't wanna repeat the end of my "Eternity's End" post. To be honest, I didn't really watch the announcement fully on YouTube/Twitch and all the material related to it in-depth. It was just me quickly looking at various tweets and articles on Wowhead and MMOChampions before cutting out more of World of Warcraft related stuff out of social media, YouTube and etc. Going back to community argument from the start of this "article", I've realized that many critics of the game are slowly descent into madness of the same nature as those who remain blindly royal to Blizzard with all its flaws and controversies.

What's more concerning is that I've begun to notice how some of my friends and acquaintances seemed oddly dedicated to all this mess. It's one thing to seek the irony and laugh at some things, but where it just feels forced or straight up cringe. And I don't want to fall deeper into this trap since I think that my scuffed coverage of Shadowlands here is kind of part of that problem. Enough is enough. I would much rather follow the example of Marlamin, who wants to retire from WoW datamining, by properly cutting myself out of the game's community. As before, I leave some room for potential look back. However, I just want to enjoy freedom and fly away to greener pastures of gaming industry with its variety of older classics and indie goodness, which includes all the good that Warcraft had and still currently has. That's where I'll take my place in these Halls and beyond.