A lot of discussion has been had about the story, tone and themes in Dragonflight, covering everything from the obscure side quests to the main cinematic beat. By contrast and comparison to Shadowlands, I think the majority agree, DF is better, for sure. But it also feels like something is still missing.
I’ve played Warcraft since Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, WoW since Vanilla, and have completed (and took the time to properly read) over 15,000 quests - around 65% in the game, generally poke around to read lore text and easter eggs as well, and finally I’ve gone through most of the real world books too, though not all. Certainly, not the most completionist in the world, but I’m fairly confident in my loremastery. Maybe I could have “Stumped Sean”.
It’s time for a tremendous rant in three parts; The problems, the examples, and the loose threads. I yell into the void towards Blizzard, and all who would cast their eyes on my madness. @Erudician this one’s for you bud
The Problems
I wanna give the story team some credit first - I’ve seen a big effort to get more in line with the canon since Shadowlands, interviews and even forum posts providing lore judgments and clarifications, I’ve seen respect paid to the old lore in Dragonflight in a way I haven’t seen since Legion and earlier. It’s good, sometimes it’s even great… But I’ll be honest, it’s still not as good as Legion and older, for a few reasons:
1. Too much focus on new things instead of following up on old loose plot threads.
- Why focus on the Loamm Niffen for Zaralek instead of the Drogbar, Goblin variants, or any other earthen/underground race we already knew? Blizzard spent so much time building out the cosmology to explain where everything came from, then introduced the Niffen with 0 connection to any lore. They feel forced and weird, Like a lot of Shadowlands did. But maybe that’s just tinfoil.
- What little lore The Niffen came with was sketchy - For example what is a Kithmane? Why did they burrow “up” into Zaralek from deeper underground? Are they related to Therazane and Deepholm? Are they former Titanforged? Void creatures? I can tell you the entire heritage from Orc to Magnaron, The history of the Empire of Arathor, How certain mortal races have alignments to various terrestrial and extraplanar locations… but in spite of the amount of screen time the Niffen get, I know hardly anything about them beyond their propensity for giggling and huffing fart smells. Great.
- They were designed as a half-baked meme race with no real backstory. That’s not okay, not even for a side race in a small quest hub, let alone a main campaign story hub. Blizzard has always had higher standards than this for story content. For example: Even The Sporeggar of Zangarmarsh have more substantial lore than the Niffen, and that’s purely TBC, before considering the WOD reveals about the Botani and the Sporemounds stuff. Just think about that when you wonder why Zaralek Caverns’ lore is so unpopular.
- This one may seem harsh but it needs to be said. Your new ideas don’t deserve that main story spotlight before it’s been earned. It needs to be side content you can follow up on later if people like it enough- Like the Drogbar were in Legion, the side story to the Tauren (different tauren but still a core warcraft thing). By persisting in the world until now, and because of their association with Neltharion storylines, they totally earned their main story spot… but for some reason they got the side quest treatment, while these goofy stinky mole people were front and center. I’m sorry, but someone liked their moleman creations a little too much and it drained away the “Warcraft potential” of Zaralek Caverns. Every single quest would have been better if it was Drogbar instead of Niffen, and I don’t even like the Drogbar that much. It’s just obvious that makes more sense.
2. Class fantasy just isn’t part of Dragonflight for some reason, except for Evokers.
- It’s cool that we’ve expanded the “Profession Fantasy” but it’s weird that I feel more like a Jewelcrafter than a Paladin most of the time. I LOVE crafting stuff, it reminds me of the old days, where more respect was paid both to profession fantasy and class fantasy. But we’re only getting half of that now.
- I believe Class Order Halls tapped into something special, something we lost when the game gave up class trainers in the world as a concept. Not the leadership aspect, We don’t need mission tables or all that borrowed power bloat, but rather the central class fantasy/lore/reward locations that could be tied into every story/expansion going forward. Imagine Class Order halls that had the level of work put into them that Covenant Zones did - creating evergreen content in unique areas for each class. For example, Tie Light’s Hope Chapel in East Plaguelands, do something with those Plaguelands towers like the anima conduit system, Let Paladins earn Charger customizations or something. There’s a million things you COULD do. Order Halls are “the one that got away”, make it right.
- The “one size fits all race/classes” expansion introduction is lame, and a step backwards from Legion’s design and the designs of old. Having class and race specific intersections with the main storyline that change things is cool and fun. If class order halls came back, redo the new player experience to flow from Exiles Reach → Class Order Hall → Faction Capital → Chromie Time or Current Expansion. Having a class headquarters creates interactions between parts of the community that normally wouldn’t do so and it’s great for the lore and worldbuilding.
- I’m still enjoying some Legion class order hall content during current season downtime, But I know I won’t be back to Dragonflight much after it’s done, The only replayability factor for quests after loremaster is the extra lore Dracthyr get due to their bonus language.
- Blizz did excellent with DF’s class design, the talents, and the revamps, even the tier sets! But the focus of the story and additional systems has still not been on the classes, and I think that’s a mistake. Why aren’t there class skins for dragon mounts? Why not let crafters act as the tier conversion catalyst instead of some object in the world? Where are the major lore characters representing the class-based organizations, besides Dadghar and the Kirin Tor?
- If those other organizations don’t have a reason to be in the Dragon Isles, then why are the players even here? Part of why Legion was so great is that everyone had a cohesive place in the world. Do the work to explain why the Illidari, The Silver Hand etc are interested. Some of them even work as is - Like why hasn’t Odyn shown up on the Isles already?
3. How does an expansion named for Dragons manage to have no teeth? I’ll tell you (Blizzard) how - It’s just not “Metzen” enough.
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If you put the Niffen, The Drogbar, the Djaradin and the Aberrus dragonkin up on a board and asked the question, “What is the most Warcraft experience we can make with these” – I’m not sure how you could possibly arrive at Patch 10.1’s weak, disjointed story, unless your goal wasn’t “Warcraft”.
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Therefore, I call to question the intentions of those who designed Zaralek Caverns conceptually and for story - Were you trying to make a good “Warcraft” experience? Or were you trying to express your own ideas? If it’s the latter, I’m sorry, but that was a mistake. I know in your office they’re talking about telling new stories from new people, but they are wrong. I’m sorry to stifle the creativity, but ultimately the numbers show that’s not what the audience wanted. We wanted you to pick up where your predecessors left off, and continue in that same spirit. When it comes to Warcraft, you have a responsibility to be a good steward of the canon and world (That is a rough quote from Mr. Hazzikostas from interviews around DF’s launch, so please deliver on that commitment)
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Unfortunately the trend extends past Zaralek thru the rest of Dragonflight - Many have given this expansion nicknames like “Hugcraft” or “Peacecraft”. But if Shadowlands was too heavy, Dragonflight is too soft - Why can’t the team find the right balance of “Tone” anymore? It was there in Legion, and really a lot of BFA too. Educated readers will know - That’s when Mr. Metzen left Blizzard, during Legion and likely BFA pre-production - and he only just returned before Dragonflight’s release.
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Of course, it’s not all on one guy - but I imagine him to be something of an arbiter and judge of ideas, the final yay or nay on stories, and the story of both SL and DF seem off-kilter without his inputs. So, will we need to wait until 11.0 for The “Metzen Tone” to return? I sure hope not.
The Examples
I also want to provide some specific examples and recommendations to Blizzard (as if they’ll ever read it, but hey, let’s hope)
Most of the main cinematic story beats of Dragonflight are just too “soap opera”. Don’t get me wrong, some of these emotional moments are important, but it’s just been too much at this point. Where’s the action, the swearing, the blood, the honor? Where’s the Warcraft I grew up with? Rainbow dragons hugging and talking about feelings is really not what I signed up for regarding “The World of Warcraft”. That’s better suited for side quests rather than every single main story beat… For example, Shout out to “Blood, Sweat, and Teerai”, one of the best questlines in a long time. But I digress.
On that topic, Why do all the big dragons speak so slowly and emotionally, why are they spending so much time in their visage forms hugging, complimenting each other and calling each other stuff like “brother” and “friend”? It’s so out of touch with the previous examples on how the Aspects act and speak, From the game itself to books and other media. I urge the quest designers to go read all the old books before they write any more dragon dialogue. I know the canon has evolved since then, but I don’t see why their personalities needed to change so much. Whomever(s) wrote Veritistrasz can have free reign instead - they “understood the assignment”.
I also feel bad for the voice actors, They seem talented but getting bad direction. Alexstrazsa, Ysera, Nozdormu and Ebyssian all got it really bad. They all have these awkward pauses and over-the-top annunciation in their dialogue that just breaks my immersion completely. Merithra, Wrathion and Sabellian fall somewhere in the middle, and the opposite end of the spectrum is Kalec- he sounds very natural in both speech cadence and dialogue choice - It seems like the Blue Dragonflight stuff is being handled by a different team maybe? Overall Azure Span writing and dialogue has just been tangibly better than the rest, from the levelling campaign to the more recent stuff. Can we put that team in charge?
Then in contrast we have the Niffen… Makin some sniffin jokes. Their whole society was just incinerated by a Shadowflame Incarnate and tons of their friends and family died in horrible burning agony in front of them, the scent of roasted mole still in the air, but sniff sniff they’ll dig some more up for us later LOL! Hey can you go tickle some snails and collect some poop for us? 
… Was it Blizzard’s intent to show they have limited mental capacity or something? Taken at face value they honestly seem like there is just something wrong with them, but I know the truth is they just didn’t get that much thought put in beyond farming updoots with moleman maymays.
The entire Niffen culture should have been a side quest hub like the Azure Span furbolg, not a main story beat. If you had told this story about the Drogbar instead, or even a race of goblins, dwarves, any earthen race we knew… the reception would be completely different and Zaralek Caverns would have made way more sense - the Drogbar could have joined us on our march to Aberrus instead of racing snails and guarding the stink worshipping mole people.
The brief Dragonmaw orc questline at the Ruby Life Pools carried more gravity to it than literally all of Zaralek Caverns outside the raid. Because I know and care about the Orcs, I know and care about the Dragons.
But I don’t know or care about the Niffen and I sincerely promise you I never will. I never wanted a story about a new furry race i’ve never heard of that acts like they have brain damage, coke habits, no real origin story, whose hobbies include collecting things that smell like farts, making candles and incense out of them, then scamming people into buying into them with ponzi schemes. Maybe that’s what y’all Californians think is cute and funny but nobody else “gets it”. Maybe there’s some American cultural joke here I’m not getting, but to me it’s just weird and doesn’t feel like Warcraft.
I want the story focused on the thousand loose plot threads you’ve left with the races and cultures I know and love. Again, if Loamm was a Drogbar or Goblin town, this all would have felt like a followup to Legion’s, Even Cataclysm’s stories. Instead it feels like cheap fanfiction. The main story campaign keeps feeling like cheap fanfiction that couldn’t possibly have been written by Blizzard(and Metzen). That’s the problem and it has been for a while.
This is a lesson you should have learned in Shadowlands, but I’ll tell you again - We don’t want your new ideas, we want you to finish telling the stories you’ve abandoned and forgotten over the last 20+ years. I get that’s scary for some devs who haven’t been working that long, let alone having that much time with the Warcraft universe. Well, buckle up buttercup, you’ve got history homework to do. And I’ll help.
As a bonus, I’ll call out several loose plot threads- There’s a lot that never got followed up on. I suspect Blizz has some of these in a folder called “World Revamp” gathering cobwebs and dust, but just in case:
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Why haven’t we revamped everything from Gilneas to Sunwell on one timeline and connected map ID? This whole area is full of things waiting to happen. Like, an expansion’s worth of content…
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Why don’t we have Stratholme and Deatholme connecting in the open world with some of the Darkfallen represented there?
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Will we ever see the rest of the Zul’Aman empire? TBC condensed their historical territories into a tiny slice of the Ghostlands, but they should have a Hinterlands sized region over there to themselves, right?
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What happened to the WOD Draenor monsters who escaped into the Barrens? Not only beastial races like the Saberon, but if I recall, evergrowth Botani as well. Lots of potential here, but nothing happened since that plot in BFA.
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What happened to the Scarlets claiming they had the true heir to Lordaeron?
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Donova Snowden and Sonova Snowden, Can we explain the relation? Obviously doing Furbolg stuff is their family trade or whatever, but like… it’s never mentioned anywhere how they are related, even though they must be, right? This is an obvious miss, someone just forgot. They’re marked on wikis as “untyped relative”.
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What do the old Centaur think of the new Centaur (who are actually the oldest Centaur)? Was there any consideration to how this would affect the world?
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There’s an old quest from WOTLK called “A Letter For Home”, Involving a Troll Mage who infiltrated Malygos’ forces, but was slain - We find the letter to send to his sister Deino. The NPC actually sends you a piece of mail back a few days after the quest, Deino swears she will have vengeance on the blue dragonflight for what they did. She was also a Mage Trainer and class quest giver in Orgimmar’s Valley of Spirits, and was removed in the Cataclysm - It certainly appeared that she had left to seek her vengeance. But it never did come, did it? DragonFlight is the perfect time to resurface this old character from a DragonBlight questline. Please don’t tell me she just died to Deathwing’s attacks back then when you’re also saying you don’t have enough old lore to build off of. You do. Just go read it for once.
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Speaking of DragonBlight, What happened to the Nerubians after we freed them in the WOTLK dungeons? The quests indicate they’re turning away from the powers of the Lich King (Death) and back to the Void, but then we never see or hear from them again except maybe a bit in BFA island expeditions? And then there were spider people in Maldraxxas that were never totally explained - What’s going on with that? Were they related? Which came first?
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From Island Expeditions, we’ve had many of the dragon hints pay off, but there was an indication that the Twilight Dragonflight was doing something in Grim Batol and there were more eggs - Y’all remember that plot thread, right? If every dragon in Azeroth felt the call of the Isles, even the Black Dragons and Nether Drakes from Outland showed up, so where’s the Twilight Dragons?
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On Dathia and Koroleth, Night Elf characters made a lot of sense to join the primalists, Frustrated with the state of the world. But that was a missed opporunity that was never explored, instead with both being presented as one note “TITANS R BAD” generic villains, never once even referencing Teldrassil, being let down by the alliance, anything. We don’t even know where they came from because Night Elf heritage/families haven’t been explored much. With the world tree plot on the horizon, are we going to see some Night Elves still interested in vengeance? Any that have become disillusioned with Tyrande’s newfound peacenik attitude?
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BTW, The Night Warrior Tyrande and the elves being aggressive was actually reminiscent of the WC3 Night Elves, and that’s what people want to see. Both the Night Elves and the Blood Elves have become weird cutesy anime versions of their original selves, and they need to go back to being vicious forces of nature and magic, ASAP. I consider the Night Warrior a forgotten plotline, but I also consider the vampiric, Naa’ru draining Blood Elves to be a forgotten plotline. Both of these concepts were just so much better than what is presented now.
Well, this was a long one. If you made it this far, good for you!
In summary - For some reason, Nothing has “teeth” under the current writing team, and I believe that’s one of the reasons why there’s minimal public interest in the story of this expansion, and why the mainstream gamers aren’t buying the box - but they bought D4 like hotcakes. Look at DF’s marketing compared to Cataclysm’s. That really says it all, honestly.
Nobody wants to feel like World of Warcraft’s story has been hijacked by fanfiction writers but that’s what it feels like without the “Metzen Tone”.
It’s not about the man himself, He’s but a mortal like the rest of us, and won’t always be there. It’s about carrying the torch and spirit of “Warcraft” forward. Not with newfangled creatures giggling and hugging all the time, but with the stories of the old world and cultures continuing, warts and all. Dragonflight has only done this some of the time, usually not with the main plot, and with the potential night elf world tree story stuff coming up, We’re gonna need the story team to have all this tightened up to get a satisfying experience out of it.
And so, I rant into the void. Thanks for reading.
