The best thing about DF is that it was so artistically bad that it was not memorable.
Anyone even remember the xpac cinematic? No?
That’s because you didn’t watch it more than once because you didn’t care.
Something about a troll and a dwarf flying around on dragons.
I called this back in late Shadowlands;
Firing a bunch of real artists, then hiring a bunch of Californian silverspoon students and furries at obviously low wages who worked on the ugly ZM zone and NPCs was an absolutely terrible omen for things to come.
I have to agree with this. You can spend an entire expansion grinding stuff to make them look decent and they just… aren’t.
Now I don’t think Zaralek Caverns was ugly per se. But the lighting was… weird. They actually added shiny pokemon to battle pets, with a 1/100 rarity colour, and other than the ones where it was obvious, in Zaralek I could legit not tell which one was shiny. I brought the beetles out having finally gotten the shiny one, and it was very, very, very obvious when summoned into normal lighting. The shiny one was PINK. And inside the cavern it looks the same dull metallic greenish colour as the other one.
On the plus side, the music that played when you were logged out was one of WoW’s best in terms of conveying the essence of the expansion to the listener. Without any visual cues you could just feel it had something to do with soaring on the winds.
Were we living on the same planet? Dracthyr were very well received. There were certainly haters (and still are) but overall I remember the hype being very real.
People liked the Drakthyr, but were disappointed that they had been so badly gimped in regards to soaring, and shorter range. It’s almost as if they announced the race/class without working out the practicalities of balancing them, and had to make some drastic limitations to them afterwards.
A friend of mine put it as: “I came back to play a dragon, but they gave me a lizard.”.
I guess it depends on how we define ugly in the context of WoW.
My personal opinion is that cata was the ugliest because it stripped the already established beauty of the world for reasons completely arbitrary. I will also never get over how awful vashjir was to quest in - I couldn’t stand it (although the zone itself was nice looking).
An ugly experience trumps an ugly aesthetic for me.
Sometimes ugly is necessary. Take BC for example. It had a lot of ugly zones. Hellfire, Shadowmoon, Blade’s Edge, and half of Terrokar, but it’s the remains of a blown up planet, so it’s to be expected that there’s a lot of wasteland. Even Netherstorm was ugly and drab on the ground, but had the coolest skies.
I guess that old adage is true “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. I thought Dragon Flight was impressive. Waking Shores has some of the best sunsets. I currently wish I was in Season 5 of DF.
Now I do agree with you about Zaralek Caverns. About an hour at a time was all I could stand of the zone. Now we are 3 out of 4 zones underground like Zaralek Caverns. It is really putting a damper on this expansion for me.
