Adapting to WoW’s Third Era
With Dragonflight, we’ve entered what Executive Producer Holly Longdale would call the Third Era of Warcraft.
For more than 15 years, we were used to play a certain way, we would gather all the daily quests from an area, complete them to increase our reputations. Upon reaching exalted, we would then visit the quartermasters and buy the pets and mounts with our gold.
Now, the world quests are scattered across the maps and they reset twice per week (instead of daily). There are hourly events happening across the entire expansion, each on a different timer and rewarding renown with different factions.
It doesn’t seem like much but, trust me, it has completely changed our way to play WoW. Before, we would just log in the game, fly to a zone and let the dailies tell us what to do.
The new system is more chaotic and requires planning. Starting my gaming session by first deciding which zone to visit and which event to attend keeps me from wondering what to do next.
On top of that, there’s a ton of pets, mounts and appearances to collect, each one purchasable with a different currency, you got to keep track!
I’m not gonna lie, the launch of Dragonflight was pretty brutal for us. We’ve stopped playing after two weeks and only came back recently.
However, we’ve managed to change our habits and we’re much more organised than before. We use Obsidian to keep track of objectives, currencies and event timers. We make notes about pretty much everything and it has greatly helped us bringing order to chaos and enjoy the game again.
I still don’t like Dragonflight and I don’t think that I ever will. It’s a patchwork of new systems, stitched up together by a mediocre story (which was so sliced up and gated behind renown that I completely lost track of): “There is an Island with Dragons, some are good and some are bad. Let’s unite so we can defeat Fyrak, the evil one.” I’m also shared about Dragonriding, which feels more like riding a glorified kite than a dragon. I can’t believe that people criticise Shadowlands when everything was better then, even the protagonist. The story of the jailer was much deeper than “I’m a bad dragon” Fyrak. Korthia was much more enjoyable than Zalarek Caverns and Zereth Mortis was definitely better than the Dream Grove with that horrible Superbloom event (whoever green lit that thing obviously didn’t try it himself). I still think that the zones were very well designed, they were just not that fun.
Changing WoW as much as the devs did for Dragonflight requires guts. When other companies try to provide the same experience with each iteration of their franchises, Blizzard didn’t hesitate to rock the boat and have us adapt to their vision. In the end, the community followed but it was a risky move to change so many things, all at once.
We’re now days away from The War Within’s pre-patch and weeks from the official release. I love World of Warcraft, and I play it first and foremost to be part of that fantastic universe and goof around with my wife and the other players. I’ve been waiting for over a decade to see more sharing between my characters and it seems to happen with the Warbands (don’t screw this up, Blizz!). I’ve also been waiting a long time for a solo end-game content that would reward us with real end-game rewards and it’s finally happening with the Delves (don’t screw this up either, Blizz!). So, despite a disappointing last expansion, I’m eagerly waiting for The War Within. I’m sure that the return of Chris Metzen will help with the quality of the story.
To conclude, I’d say that we’re far from our days running around Dark Shore, levelling our first characters and Dragonflight brought this to the next level. However, WoW remains, to me, the best game ever made and I know that by trying to content the many different kind of players that constitute its community, Blizzard is fated to create expansions that can’t satisfy 100% of the player base but it doesn’t matter because, as Ion Hazzikostas wisely said, you can do anything in WoW, you just can’t do everything.
