I honestly have no hype for this expansion at all.
I know the “no systems” people are rejoicing, but damn, are we really expecting them to deliver anything worth playing in six months besides the minimum viable product.
Put it this way. They have shown nothing of the gameplay loop in DF so far. Usually the systems are added to refine our daily activities, or at least change up the formula. Something to stave off the familiarity and boredom of doing the same gameplay loop for 15 years.
We have been told no systems, and they only have six months to deliver a sorta finished product. Are we really going to be stuck doing World Quest/Dailies for turning in caches as the only world content loop? No weird zones? No weird systems to break up the monotony?
Yeah, dungeons and raids are usually fine, but I honestly cannot see people sticking around unless there’s some sort of addition, or complete revision of the day to day gameplay.
I feel like people are gonna burn out super hard. Sure, Torghast and the Maw were terrible. But at least they tried, and the encounters with these systems were sort of new and unique for the first few weeks.
I feel like the ones cheering about having nothing new are gonna end up sorely disappointed, as if all the effort that went into Torghast/Maw will be redirected towards daily activities, and not just scrapped entirely so they can rush the expansion out for Christmas.