Just an idle thought, but Dragonflight was supposed to be the start of a new direction for Blizzard. Well… pretty much all of the character development work they are doing here seems to be on the dragons and their leadership. Now, dragons have always been around, and most aren’t exactly new characters, but they have been very much in the background, apart from everyday mortal matters (except Wrathion, I guess?).
Should we expect that to change? Are the characters of Dragonflight our future, or will we be allowed to forget them again, as soon as the next addon comes around? I think I always assumed that any dragon story would never be relevant outside of its tight confines anyways, which might have made it harder for me to really take what was happening seriously. Was I wrong about that? Will the dragons actually take the places of the faction leaders as de facto protagonists? And if that were to happen… is that a good thing or just another misstep?
And would it be better if this was a total filler addon and we moved on in 11.0, or is there something they can actually build on the dragons and draconic characters?
1 Like
They tied the Incarnates to the Void so I guess the conclusion of DF will directly lead to next xpac, which will be cosmic again (-_-). Not sure if Dragon characters will stay in the main role.
1 Like
They are tied to Azeroth and have no relevance in the cosmic plot. I just hope we aren’t forced to take orders from Alleria and Turalyon again that these Orc killers never got punished is an insult to all Orc fans.
Nothing as usal .
Juat typical Erevien BS.
You mean the orc kill during the second war, because the orcs acutely invaded the planet and their inhabitants just defend themselves
1 Like
I didn’t even think of the villains, but you’re right, if we don’t kill them this addon they could actually be something that lasts a bit into the long term. Well, one of them at least, the ice one is part oft the personal Alexstraza story now and thus will have to be resolved in her addon, and Fyrakk doesn’t seem like someone that would just roam around without provocing a boss fight sooner rather than later…
But without the “good” dragons staying, my main question still stands, I think. Neither the player character nor the usual main cast has really been build up here, so it feels like we’d have to restart that again, once the addon is over, if we don’t keep the dragons.
There is the very slight chance that this is not a filler , but a conclusion expansion .
You know how almost every story explores old regrets and ties lose ends . And than there is this time-walking stuff , hinting at Iridikron trying to destroy this “time-line” .
It almost feels like an epilogue , where we discover who married who , how many kids they had , and that they lived happily ever after .
Currently the expansion could go like this :
1: Iridikron becomes new Galakrond ( perhaps as end expansion boss or next expansion )
2: Iridikron opens void gate and we get void x titans expansions going forward
3: Unlikely , but my favorite … Iridikron destabilizes this “time line” and a reset or WoW 2 happens .
Of the above , 3 is my favorite as it could open so many new story plots .
Imagine just being sent back to Goldshire , but this time it is not actually Goldshire . Whatever could it be ?
Regarding the Aspects and one leader of the Drakthyr , they will probably remain as Anduin level importance was . Important but not the protagonists like Garrosh was . The other will be sidekicks appearing from time to time . Not sure I like that prospect , as they are starting to get supper annoying with their moaning and complaining and this equality bull**** .
As for the proto-dragon antagonists there is 50/50 chance we will kill them off this expansion .
1 Like
Imagine… having a story that goes through expansions and have an ending we go towards gradually. Having a story not being retconned or changed every single time a new expansion comes out 
The story has been going on for way too long .
It feels like this 7th (or is it 10 now) Resident Evil Movie , where you just feel like “Wasn’t she supposed to have saved humanity 3 movies ago ?”
It just feels like thumbs sucking right now .
I liked playing a medieval / early industrialization fantasy game with knights , orcs , goblins , magic and relatively conservative narrative .
Now we have freaking spaceships , dimension and time travel .
We have neon signs and “spa tourist attractions” .
Pop culture reference everywhere and constant yammering about rights and equality and individuality . In medieval setting the only rights you have are located in the weight of your coins and the tip of your sword .
The game right now feels like an illicit child between California 2023 and Europe 1700 .
Every good story needs a good ending . This one feels way past it .
FF14 did something like this when it was released , where they had this extinction event and than everyone “forgot” what happened , so that a new story opened up .
2 Likes
Agreed.
For me it would end with Legion (either Sargeras winning and destroying us, or we winning but at a cost that would build up to another game or whatever). I personally don’t mind aliens if they can be connected to us in one way or another, neither time walking… but the universe of Warcraft is too big. Ridiculously big. And the writing team (besides caring only about money) is lost, hence retconning the living 
out of everything.
Imo they could’ve introduced Shadowlands in a similar way, but in a backwards kind of trip: souls being reformed then sent back to the living world. It could be a different planet, a different big bad wolf with a different goal (although world domination is literally everywhere now), or it’s Dragon Age. But this is my brain fart 
2 Likes
I would have ended it at BFA . The opening cinematic gave me Orcs VS Humans vibes , with the siege of Lordaeron . Only cry baby Anduin spoiled it , but it was fairly epic . It could have actually been the closing cinematic for WoW .
Just imagine WoW ending with this cinematic .
It would have been great to end it with the big war , like how the original Warcraft universe began . Maybe even duke it out with N’zoth in the last minute and that’s that .
After this Porky the Pig takes the stage and in his stuttering speech goes to say .
“Th th th that’s alll Folks”
The credits roll and we all talk about what magnificent journey it was .
1 Like
While I love the atmosphere, the tension, I would never ever consider Sylvanas part of the Horde and that is what makes me dislike the cinematic. 
But yes, it would’ve been a more rounded ending showing that neither half can coexist on a long run which makes the conflict a “cycle of hatred”.
I don’t even think that this is the main problem. The main problem is that I have no idea what the story is, or whom or what it is about. Things happening isn’t a story in itself, and I think that we have lacked any kind of coherent connective tissue for way too long. It’s a long change of “And then this happened!”. We have halfway coherent narratives within the addons, but they don’t exactly form any kind of whole.
This isn’t anyone’s story. But it should either have been the player characters’ story or the story of the world of Azeroth (probably both). Instead they seemingly chose their protagonists on a whim at any given time, without much caring about their relationship to either the world they sprung from, nor to the avatar of the player behind the screen. Which is exactly why I am worried that DF hasn’t changed anything about that. I don’t care about the dragons at all, but I just want the devs to choose a direction. If I don’t really play the protagonist, and if it isn’t the coherent narrative of the story of Azeroth itself, I’d prefer if it were Alexstraza’s story, or Anduin’s story, or Jaina’s story, or Thrall’s story, or whomever’s story instead of today this one’s and tomorrow that one’s.
That’s why I don’t really see how a WoW 2 would change anything for the better. As long as they don’t change their general approach nothing will change. If there is no story, I don’t care if there is an ending, either.
1 Like
I think the reason for this is simple: there is no ending. I wrote it on another thread that imo it is necessary to have an ending before writing a story as the story is a journey from A to B. If there is no ending, how on hell I know if I actually walk somewhere? If it would be our story, our choices would matter, but the game wasn’t designed like the Witcher series as there is no book that would state “Yes, this is the ending of Warcraft, this is the ultimate closure”. We’ll get more and more baddies from outside the cosmos whom were mentioned in a little book somewhere at the bottom of the sea and they were the previous masters of a rock that choke this abnormally strong deity eons ago.
Or something like that.
WoW 2 could make sense if the team would have an ending to work with and towards.
Why especially the ending, though, when we don’t have the other parts of the story, either? I usually don’t need to know the ending to know that I am in a story. The setup usually does the work, and it can be as simple as “my character’s journey from nobody to hero”. Just not here.
Well , WoW has never had a story like Lord Of the Rings . It is more like the chunks you describe that just happen and are referenced in later chunks .
Vanilla plus the first 2 expansions are basically finishing up the warcraft 3 story .
Than we have the expansions from Cataclysm onwards , where we set up the new Horde and the Old gods
Id say Cataclysm , Pandaria and BFA , are basically in the same block . New horde starts to grow. We fight in Pandaria , wakeup some Old gods and finish it up in BFA with a grand showdown .
WoD and Legion feel like a thematic step back ( probably because of the Movie being released than)
Shadowlands is … just there .
And Dragonflight now … is … there as well .
But I do agree with the sentiment that nothing would change in WoW 2 unless something changes in the creator/management ring behind WoW . Still it would give a chance to change things . You can not expect a new shape of pasta to suddenly come out of the same pasta machine .
Personally , the small stories which change from zone to zone appeal to me . When the story is constantly heading in the same direction , at some point you just say “Is there no end to these random color cosmic blobs . Can’t we just slay some boars or something ?”
I don’t like ff14 partly because the player is the protag and it keeps following the same predefined path .
They just introduced a time skip, and they have released books about the state of the world for a few years now. If they wanted to change things, they already had created their opportunity. They repeatedly chose not to.
Oh, I certainly agree, FF14 isn’t a model I’d like to see emulated, either. Though it at least knows what it’s doing, which I sadly can’t say about WoW’s development. I am not arguing for subjugating everything else to a main plot. Indeed, I personally would prefer local sideplots without a main plot to a main plot without local sideplots. That’s pretty much what we had in the first era of WoW. The connective tissue wasn’t so much what happened in this quest chain or that, but the stuff we found out about the world behind it. The world was the main character, and the adventurer doing stuff was just our window inside. We got to know the world through exploration and thwarting plots to change it. And I wouldn’t mind that as the model going forward. I certainly care much more about exploring the world of warcraft than any plot within it.
Now, there is a lot of room between vanilla style questing and FF-style virual novels. I don’t necessarily mind a main plot. But if(!) there is one, we need to have it connect to other main plots of the preceding addons, if we are supposed to care. The easiest way I’d propose to make the connection would be to have the character that will always be there the connective tissue. The player character as an actual character, with relationships to the NPCs they interact with. Of couse that can only ever go so deep, but… it can go deep enough to feel something, which is better than nothing. And nothing is pretty much what I get, when I’m just there to witness while the story of Jaina, Thrall and Wrathion is playing out, totally ignoring me as well as Azeroth and the happenings there.
Easier to build, at least for me. If I know where I’m heading, it’s easier to build around that journey, even if the ending changes. Again, for me. Whenever I start a story, if I don’t know where I’m going, it becomes a bunch of “collection of stuff that happened in the meantime” bringing in new characters, new places, etc. It did happened with me that I rewrote a closed novel simply because I changed the ending a bit that changed the journey a bit, but it was still easy as I had something to work towards.
I’m so eager to see where we are heading with Warcraft and it makes me so frustrated in RP/novel making as I don’t know wtf is going on, then everything is changing with every expansion.
Yes, not here. Before the whole champyon thing we were mere adventurers exploring the world and helping the factions with their own problems, now we are the saviour of the world no matter what.
This would add a lot of flavour and would strengthen our “champyonness” to make us actually important.
They killed thousands of Orcs. Thrall being the weakling he is will never see retribution for them almost wiping out the entire Orc race.
1 Like
