I thought some of the voice actors did a good job, like Wrathion, Chromie, and some side characters. Kalecgos just does sound like some dude which is odd for such a magical fellow, and especially unfortunate since the “get the blue dragons back together” quests were some of the most charming adventures of the expansion, since you got to meet weird characters and revisit the old world.
Others, idk if the actors had enough to work with in terms of writing. Alexstrasza has a lot of dialogue to deliver but most of it is just “shove the plot forward dialogue”, and she isn’t a character with a lot of personality other than “serious leader mom dragon”–and she has to share even that personality with the other serious leader dragon lady, Vyranoth. Immortal, somber, high-minded, serious characters are hard to write for and hard for actors to infuse personality into and Azeroth has an overabundance of beings like this.
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I did notice that there seemed to be LESS voice acting than usual too. I’ve gotten kind of used to having a lot of it, but it’s felt more sporadic this time around. I haven’t measured it exactly but it just seems like there’s a bit less voice acting overall.
I mean, if we’re honest, WoW has exactly one character and they are all it.
The vaguely authoritative, vaguely clueless capital h Hero who doesn’t use contractions when they speak and just kind of relays plot information to you and never really has an emotional reaction to events beyond a stoic suffering or weary approval.
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I think we found which desk the Bonzai tree is sitting.
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In Legion he just kinda snorts his nose at Vol’jin dying, gets a girlfriend, toasts to the Horde beating the Legion and cracks a joke about Gallywix being a rat.
He kinda peaked there. He was barely in it.
MoP…I don’t think he was in MoP. Cataclsym, takes his dad’s place in Mulgore obviously and beats up a Grimtotem.
Not in BC or Wrath.
Vanilla, he tells you to beat up Dwarves.
Legion was a good year for him, then.
I thought he got beaten up by Garrosh in MoP? And he loses Camp Taurajo in Cataclysm, which counts.
Well I’m certainly not done with it.
Oh well bloody hell, that was my inside voice…now I’ve got to recalibrate.
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I’m still bewildered how they not only excluded Malfurion, but also forced Hamuul Runetotem to moderate a weekly quest.
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My opinion falls within what many others have expressed in the thread: Gameplay-wise, Retail has never been better. The game respects player time, there’s plenty to do even at the end of the expansion, and I’m still logging in to play as opposed to only RP. I’m used to PvE being dried up at this juncture and the only draw to the game being roleplay and this is a welcome change.
But I also agree that the storyline has been fairly basic. It’s had some highlights, like the villains actually having motivation and personality (looking at you, Jailer). And as technically one-dimensional Fyrakk was, it worked because a psychopathic but also unapologetic dragon armed with dangerous magic and a bone to pick is surprisingly refreshing. He didn’t need a redemption arc, he didn’t care who his allies were or if they died or not, he was just evil and wanted to cause pain for the sake of it. Matt Mercer also hammed it up perfectly. Irikidron knew what he was doing when he let the mad dog off his leash to cover his true plans.
That said, I wish Raszageth got more screen time, along with Vyranoth’s deflection. Both had a good baseline for a story but ultimately felt rushed. We definitely could have done with a few more scenes from both, especially in the context of Alexstrasza’s irredeemable past screw ups. Raszageth’s and Vyranoth’s anger was justified and they deserved more than a few “I’m sorry, I’ll listen now’s” from Alexstrasza. I hope to see actual concessions to Vyranoth in the future as the prospective Primal Aspect, and actual representation and presence of proto-dragons in Dragonkind, else the war would have been for nothing.
Overall good expansion, but story was not the highlight. I hope Blizzard is able to continue the balance between good gameplay and story with The War Within.
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As someone who sincerely thinks that Dragonflight’s story was a solid fine (not good, not bad, just fine), I’m glad they experimented with it.
In SL, they tried to go with increasingly big world ending stakes, and kind of burned us out on that front, after the rolling brain aneurysms they caused us with the “reveals” of everything the Jailer caused.
This time they tried a more grounded narrative. If anything, it was too grounded. The dragons were having a time that never, at any real point, felt like it was especially high stakes for any of the rest of us. We’re either hanging out with eager archaeologists or helping the Toretto’s… I mean Aspects rebuild their family. It was a bit TOO low stakes where largely everyone was pretty happy, fighting some fairly low stakes villains, who were dealt with fairly easily. They seemed to try to SUDDENLY make the stakes really big by claiming that corrupting the world tree would corrupt the whole world (didn’t happen with Teldrassil or Nordrassil but whatever) and that was a bit of a whiplash moment, especially in light of the fact that Fyrakk acts like a petulant child with superpowers. He was a threat, but somehow didn’t hold a candle to the usual end-expansion villains of Warcraft.
Anyway, they tried a low stakes narrative and went a little TOO low. I’m hoping now that they can find a happy middle ground; introducing high stakes environments that feel relevant and connected to the world of Azeroth without undermining previous WoW villains. An evil character does not need to be a mastermind far surpassing the previous boss. Garrosh, for example, was a fascinating villain who never, at any point, was as powerful as the Lich King. We do not need a Jailer figure with ridiculous power scaling to overemphasise the threat - we just need a solid villain who can stand on their own. I am hopeful with Xalatath. I guess we’ll see though.
Still, I’m glad that they took the time and space to lower the stakes, pare things back a bit, and try to get back in touch with what the fanbase actually wants. For the first time in quite a while, I find myself optimistic for the next expansion.
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I’ve already put 70 hours into Baldurs Gate 3 and I’ve only owned it for a week oh god help me- HELP ME
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Therapy can suck, especially if you don’t get the right therapist or they have an agenda rather than your needs at the forefront of that therapy. Therapy, especially for the issues of mental health and mental illness, is still positively dripping with the contempt and negative connotations its been saddled with since the early 60’s and 70’s where only ‘damaged’ or ‘lesser’ individuals ‘suffered’ from.
Scrubbing off that filth from the process and reminding folks its a normal, healthy thing to deal with trauma and not let it deform and control your life and your psyche is, like most things challenging the status quo, is a battle of attrition. Thirty years ago, if you admitted to having a mental illness or talking to a therapist, you were given the side-eye at best and ostracised for being ‘a crazy’. Twenty years ago, you were a coward and just needed to ‘man up’, or you got the ‘all women are crazy!’ and people laughing at the joke. Ten years ago, it became a lot more socially acceptable to admit to needing or seeking therapy, but its still an uphill battle, especially amongst the older generations and with pressure from that generation, to keep it to yourself, never talk about it, never admit to it.
Therapy sucks, but I’d rather go through it than keep being the broken husk of a human I had been before I started. Its a lot like physiotherapy, except since there’s no casts, no scars and wheelchairs, people still don’t really get how much of a struggle it is to get back to something approaching normal inside your noggin.
Therapy is wonderful and helpful, the issue with WoW’s ‘talk therapy’ all depends on if the players actually like the characters having one.
What exactly are we considering as ‘talk therapy’, the cutscenes, the ‘stay and while and listen’ dialogue from certain characters, ambient quest dialogue?
I don’t know if anyone’s specifically mentioning talk therapy so much as a general weariness for watching Anduin go through it?
Again, I can only speak for me. I’m just not excited about seeing a deeply meaningful and complicated process be portrayed by the same company that brought us Sylvanas working for the robot devil.
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Just getting back into things and starting the Dragon Isles thing. My god is the writing heavy-handed and generally just bad. I don’t know if it’s just me or how long it’s been like this but man listening to Lor’themar and thalyssra randomly profess their love to each other in a way that absolutely nobody would ever say out loud to the dragons… dragoning… I knew the story this expansion wasn’t going to be for me but MAN.
And the worst thing is you can see it. You can see where the divide is. The ‘high level’ plot stuff is very obnoxious and without any subtlety at all and the then you see other obviously lower priority stuff like the expedition crew and it’s charming in a cartoon like fashion at least (at least so far). Which tells me that the talent divide in the writers room is backwards. This is possibly something Metzen can help but I don’t have the rose coloured glasses about his work that others do… but he at least got that ‘epic’ feeling right.
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I think Metzen was out for this one and only just recently came back?
But you don’t have to tell me it sucks. Ultra Sensitive Ally Blizzard is somehow just as grotesquely offensive as Callous Metal Edgelord Blizzard.
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Some days I feel like I’m the only person that has enjoyed DF’s story so much. 
I took this expansion’s storytelling as a direct epilogue to the events that transpired in the Shadowlands. I will be the first person to set fire to the memory of SL, but digging into the story out of game has been enlightening. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve looked into and the implications of what Zovaal was trying to accomplish suggests a lot of things to me.
What I mean is this; if Shadowlands was the culmination of Zovaal’s designs over this expansive length of time, then Dragonflight is the direct aftermath. AKA the unraveling of many of those machinations, the mending of wounds received over this entire volume of Warcraft up to that point.
For example, the factions deescalating. I feel like both factions’ leaders understand that they were ultimately pawns in an intergalactic game of chess. Not to use the meme, but that was the story we were given. I think it was told incredibly poorly in game, but the story itself isn’t that bad. At least, I didn’t think so.
Anyway, I’m sorry so many people don’t enjoy the story lately! That sucks, maybe there’s other aspects of the game to explore? I recently gave M+ another shot after a long time and I think I want to do more. Other than that, just leveling up Jazashi is all that’s up with me right now!
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Yeah that’s the feeling I get. I don’t want to be annoyed but every character so far seemingly has to very plainly put forward all of their thoughts, feelings and intentions and at least for my mileage, I find it insults my intelligence a little. I mean I write audio fiction and don’t have the benefit of visuals and my characters don’t even tell the listener everything that’s going on as much as these people.
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That’s basically it. I wasn’t expecting WoW’s writing to magically improve or anything, but it would be nice to see actual tension or something.
I feel like Blizzard has wholly internalized a particular section of the internet’s narrow definition of progress where everything is safe, sane, healthy and wholesome–which, IMO, is the sort of progressivism that aligns so closely to conservativism that it’s basically the same thing.
You help centaurs get married, but you don’t see any of their romance. The dragons are wholesome and good, but they’re boring and weak. The conflict is traumatic and severe, but it’s also got Superfriends-style cheesy scenes and aggressively wholesome vibes. It’s so saccharine and gross.
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Yeah, it’s hard to love. It feels, far more then usual, like I’d be ashamed of what I was playing if a normie was to walk in and hear the stilted dialogue. Reclaiming Undercity was something that I had to force myself to enjoy much more then I did because it felt like they were writing the whole thing in response to plot points people whined about on the forums. People don’t like Calia so she’s obsessed with having everyone like her in a very immediate way. She spends her entire time (while trying to do things for the Forsaken) addressing why people won’t like her and wondering if people will ever love her. The writers never set up any real stakes between her and Lillian Voss, it felt, from the very beginning that we were only two quest turn ins away from Lillian Voss being like “No everyone, she’s definitely one of us. She’s just sad that she’s a Menithil. Something we’ve almost universally been shown to not really dwell on but she’s definitely dwelling on it enough for all of us.” It makes the whole thing feel disingenuous.
I wish I was being picky too but this was actually one of the least offensive versions of this problem that I’ve encountered so far this expansion (between what I’ve played and the cutscenes I’ve already seen). Like you said, Blizzard has never been awesome in regards to this but what they always were able to do was make the big, stupid epic moments… well, stupidly epic. They managed to overpower all the filler and that hasn’t really happened in awhile.
Also, I have to add, Sylvanas doubling down on her “I always loved you, my people, and I love Nathanos the most and can’t wait to find him again.” thing is SO bad. This is the part of her storyline where she should be admitting to the fact that she was using the Forsaken as a way to stave off her own death, as armor shielding her from the dark nothingness of the void before she realized she actually did care about them… you know, rather then this revisionist doubling down of the ‘You were never just arrows in my quiver and I wish more then anything to rejoin you one day.’ thing. Seeing as she’s going through a redemption arc anything she says at this point needs to be seen as her true feelings so we have to assume this is a washing of her character and essentially, rewriting her motivations to a very bland, very two dimensional version of her character.