Dreadnaught is doing well considering how niche it is. WotLK Classic will be very much alive, I’m sure! Especially once people realise that Retail will be the same old shti they’ve spoon-fed us for years now.
Honestly, I am mildly optimistic from the get go, unlike with Shadowlands, the reveal of which instantly filled me with scepticism due to the fact that explaining death and the afterlife is a huge no-no of fantasy world building for me, regardless of how decently is or isn’t written unless the setting is whacky enough to support the weight of such revelation (and the wow setting is not, really).
With Dragonflight, if the leaks are to be believed, we basically have an enormous “kill the big bad evil dragon” theme and story, and whether said big bad evil dragon is bootleg Tiamat or Super Sapphiron on steroids is, ultimately, of little importance because at the end of the day the whole premise is a conceptually simple affair in a classic fantasy kind of way and it has the potential to be big, dumb fun (and by the titans, WoW desperately needs something that is big, dumb fun right now).
Dragons have been long overdue an expansion of their own, they are a fantasy staple and almost everybody likes them, or at least doesn’t overtly dislike them. Depowering the Aspects, a group of very recognizable characters and tossing them aside was a very bad decision and the potential of having them re-empowered and being instrumental in the defeat of their own big bad dragon adversary is again, simple and effective fantasy story telling, regardless of whether it is decently or badly written (and we all know it won’t be decently written, come on, it’s WoW).
Dragons have also accumulated over the years a significant amount of stories that need resolving and have ties to a lot of themes:
- Wrathion looking for the Dragon Isles.
- Reversing the whole sterility issue and, generally, rebuilding the Dragonflights with whatever mcguffin we find at the Dragon Isles.
- Nozdormu’s fall and his transformation into Murozond, the beginnings of the Infinite Dragonflight.
- Who gets to be Ysera’s successor as the Green Aspect (my man Itharius needs to do something, come on).
- Wrathion becoming the new Black Aspect.
- The Blue Dragonflight still has a ginormous vault full of dangerous magic stuff that they most likely cannot guard properly anymore.
- Odyn appearing and doing stuff because he hates dragons.
- Something, something new Titan facility is revealed.
- Something, something Elune, something something we will connect this whole issue with the cosmic nonsense somehow because why not.
And all of these are from the top off my head. If we dug deeper, there would certainly be more dragon related stuff forgotten that need resolving.
Couple that with the fact that the leak states that apart from Dragons, the secondary focus will be in the Lordaeron subcontinent and the ingredients are there for a fun expansion even if the writing remains consistently terrible. Legion has shown us that even if the writing is bad and nonsensical, as long as the overall premise is decent or at least fun, you get to nitpick less and have a better time, and I can see Dragonflight be just that.
As long as we keep as far away as possible from cosmic stuff, Light vs Void, Cosmic Pantheons, celestial 3D printers and the usual cast of character NPCs that we are all burnt out of, we will be good.
So, yeah, midly optimistic on the story / worldbuilding department. Honestly, it is the gameplay that will make or break the expansion for me moreso than the story.
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We also have a pretty good spread of themes with the different flights.
Just time/dimension travel alone is enough for quite a lot of variety, and as long as they stick to the old pre-wod-format of not changing the timeline, it won’t break anything either.
Then we have a whole swarm that’s all about magic and its dangers, and a vault full of that stuff. Considering there are a lot of tainted artifact weapons we are still missing there could be some really cool and familiar stuff.
I guess the Emeralds are more “cosmic” by nature, but I don’t think exploring how the Emerald Dream fits into the changed cosmology wouldn’t exactly be a bad thing, and beautiful dreamy wilds are always nice to have. Also, they are still tied in with the Nightmare stuff, and I wouldn’t mind a deeper dive in what actually happened there. Whatever you may think of Old Gods, the way they got shoved aside with the end of BfA was jarring, so there better be some rhyme or reason behind their actions.
The Blacks have to be entirely rebuild, and their earth and fire stuff fits in pretty well with more shamanistic themes. And really, we haven’t gotten a cool volcanic zone since the Blackrock area… Well, Frostfire was cool, but the volcanoes weren’t really setting the tone.
And then there are the reds, which… ok, they’ve mostly been fire-breathing flying lizards, but there has to be at least one flight focussed on that, doesn’t it? Some less magicky direct conflict plots certainly aren’t a bad thing. And if we want to dive into the magic side… well, the healing flame thing is pretty cool, and could be explored a lot more than it was.
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The Reds have historically been about life and healing and their whole shtick feels like it was supposed to be the cauterizing of wounds and then rebirth through fire, hence being fire breathing cleansers. Alexstrasza is also supposed to be the Queen of all dragons, and, again, if the leaks are to be believed, she is also the Khadgar / Magni figure of the expansion. Thus I can see the Reds beings the lynchpin that connects the stories of the other Flights together in a more cohesive meta-narrative, while also being the ones spearheading the search for whatever mcguffin renews all of the flights in the Dragon Isles (and not Wrathion, who even if he is the one finding the Isles, has his own stuff to deal with).
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