Hard hard hard disagree…
It’s had it’s high-points, mostly in the past. It’s mostly in the more recent times that it’s trended towards mediocre
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No, this wouldn’t be an issue if the dialogue was actually, you know, good? People wouldn’t be upset, I am sure, if the writing was actually good.
It took a step and it didn’t keep walking. The character animation is more stiff than a 2010s Sonic game.
Not changing is not a good idea. They need to change… into something with good writing and animation… They have these cartoony characters and they take 0 advantage of that.
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The cutscenes these days are lip synced but sure keep on saying that somehow the ingame cutscene are somehow still bad when it’s not.
The animation is fine as is I don’t see any issues with it.
Define “good” because to each different people “good” means something different in terms of usage.
Hard agree
Was not a fan of this xpac.
The content was trivial and the story was too family friendly for a game called Warcraft.
Didn’t like many of the tier sets most looked a bit goofy.
Didn’t like how trivial m+ was until this season
Didn’t like most of the raid encounters. Tindral was the best thing since sliced bread
Shadowlands was more enjoyable for me personally. Even though I didn’t really like that one either
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Would personally rate Dragonflight as “meh” wasn’t great, wasn’t bad. C’s get degrees.
That being said, it’s a HUGE step forward from a complete dumpster fire that initiated a mass migration to other MMOs and turned a bunch of former WoW players into “WoW refugees” like people fleeing from a civil war.
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For my money, Dragonflight was refreshing; instead of having a biggererer god entity that was going to destroy the world forcing us to step up and claim another borrowed power we got an expansion that focused more on the concept of rebirth and telling more small, thoughtful stories.
Like seriously: The emberthal and ebyssian cinematic is probably the single best one in the entire game IMHO and it doesn’t have giant explosions or gods or loud noises and flashing lights… Just two people allowing themselves to be open with their emotions and shame with it ending on a hopeful note.
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Dragonflight:
- Idk, I remember the cinematic with Iridikron @ the end of the ‘Dawn of the Infinite’.
I thought it was really cool & ominous, thinking at the time how I thought he was pretty well-written.
- I also remember Raszageth pretty well too along with the Primalists & various characters being infused with eternal elemental power — All in all, thematically I enjoyed Dragonflight far better.
- I also rather enjoyed the blue dragonflight “He is NOT alone!” cinematic with Senegos.
I wasn’t a fan how they depicted they were just always long-lived when the aspects had their powers & not actually immortal (lame!) but yeah.
- The Black Dragonflight chosing their next aspect was pretty neat too. I was happy with how it was ultimately done.
- I was also a big fan of the Netherwing Flight and the Stormwing Flight questlines too, where Vyranoth essentially told Odynn to suck it & that Dragons are free to do as they please. lol
Shadowlands:
Shadowlands on the otherhand, the thing I remember most is how all the afterlives were 3D printed, everything is robotic or synthetic and nothing — even in the afterlife, is eternal and is ultimately doomed to crumble without fresh souls (which in a sense means the number of souls is finite & limited too).
It just felt contradictory to the overall theme of what the expansion SHOULD had been.
Not to mention it was a hard, massive - Ginormous kick in the balls to faith ordeals in the game & their role played in the afterlife … Not to mention the huge retcons applied.
Overall?
Regardless of which one has more memories — I have more positive memories & feelings towards Dragonflight, than I do to Shadowlands.
- That may not be a huge W but it’s significantly better than something equally as bad – or worse.
Dragonflight felt like a well-needed vacation from all the BS and something to clear the destructive rubble the pass two expansions had left in its wake.
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Kinda thought this was a narrative discussion, but if we’re talking gameplay df is pretty good. Dynamic flight is excellent and needs to be incorporated to ground mounts in some fashion. Talent trees with room for growth are a welcome return to form from the pick 1 of 3 lines we had for awhile. Professions glow up was probably too hardcore for some people but it was fun to min max if you’re a fan of crafting in rpgs. Dungeons and raids were solid and pvp got dragged through the dirt again, as is tradition. The crest upgrade system is the best character progression change they’ve put in the game and I’m glad they seem to agree. And evokers were neat until they made augmentation, so that’s a plus.
My only gripes were the short season lengths since my guild would have appreciated a few more months to push for a late ce (since we suck), and the inclusion of multiple ranks of crafting materials and not enough inventory space to compensate. Oh and shadow priests, they arent really any fault of dragonflight, but they annoy me.
Story team really missed with this one, i think this exp was just a bridge to new saga, that had main goal of fixing bunch of things in gameplay that were terrible, before we move on to new stuff. So story was just generic.
Sl had so much contradictions in story that made no sense, it was forcing itself to be conclusion to stuff started in wc3, but people just didnt buy it, but at the very least i felt it was trying to do something.
Df on the other hand has such generic story with no twists at all, some main Dragon figures like Galakrond were not a boss but a background in dungeon? Fyrakk is just cheap copy of Deathwing made on the fly. And set up story for Iridikron to be next figure in future.
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A lot of the dialogue in cut scenes made me think the writers took it a few steps too far on “bring your child to work day”.
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You know in hindsight it’s probably gonna go down int he same breath as shadowlands.
Not worse, but similar.
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They are doing the bare minimum. Lip-sync is the bare minimum. The characters themselves are stiff and the expressions are very bland, almost nonexistent. The recent cutscene with Kadghar is a prime example of this. The direction is also very bland. Shot-reverse-shot is all they seem to know how to do.
They call these cutscenes ‘cinematics’ but there’s nothing cinematic about them.
If characters standing there being talking heads is what qualifies as good to you, you need to consume more media.
Blizzard isn’t taking advantage of the fact that the characters are cartoon characters.
I want to say they are playing things out like it is a live action piece of media, but that’s horribly disingenuous to live action as a medium.
The cutscenes aren’t boring because “I NEED MUH WAR AND EXPLOSIONS!!!”, the cutscenes suck because there isn’t any real effort being put into them. The dialogue is bad, the writing is overall garbage, and the animation is doing nearly nothing but the bare minimum.
People sure love Breaking Bad and 90% of that show is people talking to each other. Now tell me, is it because it has some writing quality, directing quality, and acting quality, or is it because the characters are able to say words?
There are teams smaller than Blizzard that make better cutscenes than Blizzard.
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DF was a palate cleanser. A back to basics, light hearted adventure that a lot of players were asking for and I think in that regard, DF was a success.
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And the great part is you can forget all of them and it’ll mean very little next expansion. Goodbye Dragonflight!
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These are ingame cutscenes only pre rendered cinematics have the capabilities of showing emotions.
Also pre rendered cinematics are not the same as in engine cutscenes.
There is no way you unironically believe what you just said.
the expansion was good, but the story was very muddled and anticlimactic, predictable and all too often was it cuddlecraft.
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Chipped off.
Mop remix when?
I will fix df like I fixed bfa.
Not leveling in it.
15th kav saw many alts made 1 to 120. Many of my horde cnars are innocent. They never touched a tree. At all.
60 to 120 all in the valley. Van and his family…they can hate my horde. He died…many times.
Mop remix, Yeah I plan a few level caps there. Df will not be touched. Only 1 char did it. And I am over age 50. I can forget things I want to remember. I can force forget this.
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DF was the “safe” expansion to try and stop the leaking from SL, so yea, it’s going to be middle of the road in basically every aspect. No real big highs, but no real big lows either. Just okay, safe.
Hopefully in TWW with an actual story happening, we get some more of those high’s again though.
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