Pet peeves: The return (Part 5)

Argent Dawn
9097

If you want to get anywhere, a community is what you need, or a guild. Can try pug normal but often pug-raids have ridiculous standards, even if Amirdrassil compared to other raids is actually pretty easy, especially on normal.

As for Dragonflight’s story, I liked alot of the emotional beats, and felt it was a nice change of pace after Shadowlands and such. It was nice to see some characters gain closure.

Out of the examples that Shogganosh mentioned, I especially liked Veritistraz, though the others weren’t bad either. And one example that he forgot to mention was seeing the spirits of Malygos and Sindragosa finally find peace.

However, there are still some plotholes left that I’d hope to see adressed, like, where did the mortal Primalist-cultists come from, how’d Kurog even manage to find Raszageth, and what will happen to Murozond and the Infinite Dragonflight now? Because I feel like the latter’s story is far from done, even if everyone was going “Crisis averted.” after the megadungeon. And also how did Iridikron even manage to time-travel on his own with Deios dead and the other Inifinites presumably having retreated? ( Unless the Void allows you time-travel now…)

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9098

I kept that under the umbrella of:

If I break down all of the emotional moments of that story, then we end up with…

  • Azuregos struggling with the fact that he will never be able to bring Anara back to life.
  • Turi Flickerflame and the Sullied Banner wrestling with the loss of Theramore.
  • Kirygosa overcoming her own trauma and grief by finding somewhere she feels at peace.
  • Sindragosa and Malygos overcoming their shared trauma and moving on into the afterlife.
  • Senegos deciding to move on and be one of the first blue dragons in over ten thousand years to die a peaceful death.

Plus minor bits like Haleh wrestling with her workaholic attitude who needs to be shown how to relax and Lanigosa, who deals with spirits which are unable to move on.

A lot of it is good. Some of it is very good. But like the rest of Dragonflight, I feel like it’s oversaturated and a little too forceful with this particular theme.

9099

New doctor who episode is out!

Non-spoilers, it’s very good.

Spoilers

Neil Patrick Harris KILLED it as the toymaker. Really fun performance, great villain, fun scenes and also oddly terrifying.

Ncuti Gatwa was also incredible as the 15th Doctor. Fantastic energy and fun and soul, and I am so excited for the full season. Really like his approach to the character!

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9100

Personally, I welcome this. Reconciliation is one of the major themes of Dragonflight, along with renewal and adventure, and I’m glad the writers are taking a shot at addressing a serious and mature topic instead of simply stringing together Cool Moments like a formulaic Marvel movie. And for what it’s worth, FFXIV also deals a lot with the emotional fallouts of past traumas.

My issues are not with the theme, but with the execution faltering in some cases.

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9101

The thing is, I see both of your viewpoints, Lintian and Shogganosh.

On one hand, it’s indeed very beautiful that they finally seem to try and tackle a serious topic in a mature way.

Yet on the other hand, Shogganosh is right when he says that it seems to be taking precedence over the action and fighting that we know from earlier installments.

In a perfect expansion, one does not exclude the other.

9102

While FFXIV does deal a lot with these sorts of emotional issues, I’d say that it’s not oversaturated with them. There’s heroic action, there’s gut-wrenching horror, there’s a little levity and yes, there’s emotional pathos too.

Dragonflight has action, humour and a little horror too, but it’s strongly outweighed by the dealing-with-trauma. It might be a major theme, but I still feel like it goes overboard with it.

In the end, whether all of the renewal and reconciliation and regret is a good or bad thing is up to you. It’s subjective. But hopefully I’ve been able to convince some people that there is a lot of it.

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9103

Total tangent from the Writing;

This ‘season limit’ on Crests… does that mean, cos I earned 450 Whelpling crests, even though I didn’t really know how to use them, I’m now stuffed and can’t earn any more? Wah?
Who thought THAT was a good idea (if that works the way I think it does)? Are you not supposed to learn to play the game via the game, and have to look up guides every single time now? Same as you’re expected to read a ton of novels for the other chunk of lore they don’t put in game? :unamused:

9104

It’s fine if characters talk about their feelings, however there are good and bad ways to do it.

For example:

“You made me Warchief! You left me to pick up your pieces! You. Failed. Me!”

Garrosh speaks of his feelings from a place of hurt, and he has earned that hurt because he truly was left atop nothing and undermined by everyone around him. We also saw how that hurt manifested in the world and in his actions, whether you agree he was justified or not (he was not in my opinion).

Vs

Kalec/Nozdormu/Alexstraza/literally any character from DF will do, speaking about their cruel fate, doubts, fears etc, as victims. They don’t try to rise above and perservere against the odds. Even nozdormu needs Chromie to pick him up when he loses hope.

That’s the best way I could describe DF as. You are looking at people complaining about the circumstances they find themselves in, without doing anything to fix it, up until when the player shows up and gets things done.

They don’t inspire anything in you. They’re not characters to look up to.

9105

Want to run some M+ together tomorrow so you can gear up? We can start easy — I have a +2 Everbloom key, which would reward 441 gear. I never ran M+ myself, but with my item level it shouldn’t be difficult.

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9106

-Pathetically grateful gamer noises-

That’d be awesome, honestly :slight_smile:

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9107

If you’re still in-game, you can whisper me (I’m online on this character, hunter Lintian). Or you can contact me on Discord (Linneris).

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9108

Think I’ve missed you (some guild and then IRL stuff came up ahah) but will give you a ping! ^^

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9109

Toybox mod for wotr has a chivo unlocker now (probably has for a while) which means I can knock the stupid midnight isles things off my list without doing them.

The all tailwind achievement on its own probably represents like 200 potential hours of gameplay so :wave: nah.

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9110

Ehhh - I disagree. Warcraft has always sort of tunnel visioned one core characteristic for the entire expansion. Dragonflight - as you pointed out - has the themes of renewal and healing and overcoming more personal strife. I feel like just dismissing the entire spectrum of what that entails as ‘everyone talks about emotions’ is a little reductive if not insensitive, which I took issue with.

Blizzard has kind of never managed to really find a good middle ground for everything. Warlords of Draenor was oversaturated with ‘hurr durr look how savage we are!!!’, Legion was oversaturated with cosmic crap, BfA was oversatured with just being a mess, and Shadowlands was oversaturated with extremely depressing and bleak realisation that you’re going to be some energy battery for cold uncaring random guys you’ve never heard of when you die.

I get that Dragonflight deep dives into the characters finally having some sort of identity and a voice and expressing it now, which I think is a welcome change of pace. Blizzard’s also known for bringing forth the oversaturated themes from past expansions, in a more balanced fashion for future expansions. I’m somewhat hopeful that just maybe in future the new NPCs we meet won’t be one-dimensional flanderized stereotypes any more. (Not to say flanderization doesn’t happen in Dragonflight, prime example being Chromie.)

I’d also say that it’s probably rather realistic that well, the entirety of Azeroth is dealing with trauma post-BfA (and whoever went to Shadowlands really needs therapy, players included).

Can’t really look at him the same once I learnt about the cake incident. :skull:

I’m not sure I agree, with both Garrosh example being inspirational (of any kind?) or someone to look up to, as in the end he also didn’t try to rise above and persevere against the odds, he needed an Old God and Fascism™ to pick him up. I am probably a little biased at this, but I really don’t like the Garrosh fanaticism at times. To me, his cameo in Shadowlands was a trite attempt of garnering some positive feedback from the players.

But also, I’m not really sure I’ve ever really been inspired by WoW’s characters. If anything, I could maybe see Malfurion going to swap with Ysera as ‘oh wow, that’s brave’ inspirational moment and even though it ended up being pointless, Ysera passing the crown to Merithra was similar in the feelings.

I think it might be worth pondering on why DF characters speaking about their cruel fate, doubts, fears, etcetera (as victims) you consider complaining. I don’t think it is. Sometimes it is simply that - talking, discussing. People verbalizing and coming to terms with whatever fate they have. You don’t always have the solutions or means to immediately rise above the discussed woes and persevere against the odds. Sometimes all you really need to do is just to talk and let it out.

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9111

Feels like a bard goody two shoes or durge playthrough of BG3 are supposed to be the canonical runs

The former playthrough feels like a relative breeze with charisma being the hard carry for getting by tougher enemies and persuading allies to offer more, all the while performing in camp and cracking jokes.

Its good, and holy hell is the game like crack for my completionist nature.

9112

Got 441 boots and a 450 bow on my Hunter just bumbling around doing weekly quests in the Dream, so she’s now 440 ilvl :partying_face: that should make life a little easier trying to turn Fyrakk into a pincushion lol

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9113

I would argue that none of those were Warcraft at its best.

In hindsight, I’d probably have to point Mists of Pandaria as an example of Warcraft at its best. The trailer ends with a simple question: What is worth fighting for? The entire expansion revolves around this and each villain fights for the wrong reason. The sha themselves are the embodiments of these dark motivators - anger, despair, doubt, fear, hatred, pride and violence.

Yet this wasn’t openly said, there was never a moment where Lorewalker Cho looked at the camera and says: “Lei Shen fought to regain his lost glory, not for any noble purpose, and that is why he lost.” Instead, it’s left unsaid and the players are allowed to realise this for themselves.

This comes to a peak at the end of the Siege of Orgrimmar, where there are multiple instances of characters deciding to not fight, because they know that if the conflict continued, it would be for all of the wrong reasons again. Some things are not worth fighting for. It’s a simple but elegant lesson taught over the course of the entire expansion.

But there was still plenty of edge, violence, humour and horror to accompany this message, to accompany all of the other Pandaren wisdom that we were exposed to. At some points it is less subtle than others, but I would say that this expansion is a lot more balanced than all of the others that come after it.

Another example of a strong delivery of a message without overemphasis is Warcraft III, which I also consider rather well-balanced and another example of Warcraft at its best.

In that game, the message is a rather simple one: Victory can only be achieved when everyone works together. Whenever the heroes drive away their comrades and try to succeed on their own, they end up corrupted and playing into the hands of the enemy.
We see this with Arthas, we see this with Grom, we see this with Illidan, who acknowledges this and exiles himself and we even see it with the Burning Legion, who begin to crumble after division is sown.
In the end, only through cooperation, unity and banding together against a great threat do the heroes have any hope of survival. It’s very basic and simple but it’s well done, without overdoing it.

The story of Dragonflight is fine, it’s even good in some places, but I still believe that the overall quality story is harmed by overdoing the theme and being a bit too blunt and direct with it. It was hard for me to not sigh when Kalec basically talked to us directly at multiple points and said “it’s about family.”

Even half of the trading post idle banter is dedicated to reminding the player that the theme of the expansion is dealing with trauma and loss, that’s how pervasive it is. That is why my reaction has boiled down to “okay, we get it, can we move on please?”

Though I’ll point out that I don’t agree with Atahalni’s take whatsoever. I think that plenty of characters in Dragonflight behave in inspiring ways, that plenty of characters are faced with understandably difficult circumstances and react in ways that are relatable and worthy of sympathy.

Honestly, out of the past five expansions, I personally think that Dragonflight has the second best narrative, after Legion. It’s definitely better than Warlords of Draenor, Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands. But I’m still going to point out the flaws that I perceive.

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9114

While I don’t disagree with your assessment of what MoP did well, I’d still say MoP did have oversaturation of themes. It’s simply part of the Blizzard DNA. And I also wonder if Blizzard’s current on-the-nose or stating-to-the-camera type of story beats is a direct consequence from the failure of MoP at the time, where literally everything you said went over 90% of the playerbase’s heads and they simply read it as ‘wtf fat pandas in MY wow??? where’s the WAR’ and was considered the worst expansion to date.

MoP was pretty heavyhanded with the way how nearly every questline had some pseudo-philosophical Pandaren wisdom lesson mixed in, every other quest had to have a proverb for something. MoP was also the first expansion to actually have the much-maligned Disney feel to the art and design of the expansion, if not storytelling (at least in my opinion, but I should also note that I’m -personally- not against it; I loved MoP’s art and design, and storytelling).

Obviously, MoP did many things wrt storytelling better, and for some bizarre reason Blizzard still hasn’t managed to replicate what made MoP’s storytelling better. They managed to worldbuild basically a completely new addition to the universe (one joke from WC3 notwithstanding) and thus far hasn’t been able to do it again. I think in the past few expansions, Blizzard has opted for worldbuilding through junk items having descriptive text, but even that is out of balance as I feel now the worldbuilding is done by game devs (not story devs) just writing something because it has to be written, rather than something intentionally placed somewhere to tell a story.

I get that, but as I’ve said earlier… I think that’s realistic? The world very literally has been through calamity after calamity to the point where people who experienced heavy loss and trauma during earlier expansions, say - Legion, they wouldn’t have had the time to unpack it before having to grapple with some new threat somewhere. With BfA ending (and Shadowlands mostly affecting a very small number of Azeroth’s people) there has finally been time to do it now.

I can very easily believe almost all of Azeroth now starting to process these things and perhaps learnt that it’s better to more openly talk about what problems they have or still face, to the point where it might be common to just throw it in casual conversation.

My main criticism of Dragonflight instead is that for many of these conversations, especially when told through questgivers to you are very often shallow because they’re not afforded more quests to actually bring forth nuance with them. Several of the quests (prime example being one of the Tuskarr renown questlines where you help someone grieve for their dead pet) just end way too shortly, which in my opinion lends credence to the Disney-fied story accusations, as the story isn’t allowed to have a better ending and needs to end NOW with everything wrapped up for a perfect ending.

I was really disappointed with how some of the stories of grief, trauma, and processing of it all ended up with the characters being like ‘ok, being sad was bad, i will smile now : )!’ and that… was it. Because that’s often not how grief gets processed or resolved. Not every time do people rise to the occasion and persevere against all odds. Garrosh in my opinion is the prime example of a character who didn’t.

Finally, given all this, I just feel like MoP was this outlier for Blizzard, because MoP aside I also prefer Dragonflight’s narrative and storytelling to Cataclysm, Wrath, TBC… and probably is on the same level as Vanilla. Granted I started playing Vanilla much later, but also revisiting Vanilla through Classic and now SoD (though I didn’t get very far first time around) I genuinely feel like the way Dragonflight tells stories feels very homely and cozy to me, sort of like how questing in early levels of Vanilla felt.

Cataclysm for example also had a LOT of problems, but looking back right now Blizzard grossly missed the mark on actual ramifications of holy :poop: the entire WORLD is freaking b r o k e n !!! Because instead of actually considering how Deathwing affected every zone in the world, very often they resorted to some awful already-old-when-Cata-launched meme jokes over genuine story telling. Because when they did do that, they did it well in Cata (I’d say all of Night Elven zones were actually done really well in Cata!) and it must have been so frustrating to be a human player at the time seeing how Westfall and Redridge Mountains were blatantly ruined because of the oversaturation of pop culture references. Especially when you could see really good plot points unfortunately overshadowed behind all the memes (both Westfall and Redridge had stories of how the lower class was disproportionately affected by the Cataclysm and how the rich upper class is fine and doesn’t want to help, leading to the rise of Defias and so on!)

(It’s also slightly ironic how Blizzard was accidentally ahead of their time with how Terminally Unfunny Rich People try to stay relevant with the youths with the me-mes that are 5+ years old. Of course, the analogy falls apart because the devs aren’t rich, but surely the rich execs had oversight on these things.)

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9115

I’ll disagree with this. There were definitely some points where this is true, but almost half of the map is devoid of pandas and there’s plenty of quests which have nothing to do with them. There were plenty of opportunities to escape from the pandas and their wisdom.

Though I came into Mists of Pandaria rather late and only partook in the expansion for a couple of months, I can’t say that I ran into any panda-hating sentiment during that period. From what I understand, the people who were turned off by the pandaren never actually bothered with that expansion at all and hopped off the train with Cataclysm.

While some of this is realistic, there’s an absence of other facets that could also be considered realistic, such as the grudges and resentment that might still exist in a war-torn world shared by two factions who were at the throats of each other less than a year ago. That’s just one example.

If realism was the primary goal, then Dragonflight would showcase the entire spectrum of emotions, negative as well as positive, but that’s simply not the case. The focus is solely on reconciliation, renewal and recovery, on overcoming grief and trauma. A truly realistic Dragonflight would make a point of showcasing how a lot of people never manage to walk the path of renewal and succumb to their trauma in a variety of unhealthy ways, never to recover.

Dragonflight’s dedication to positivity rather than a balanced representation of emotions might be why some people throw around the accusation of “Disneyfied” and why it doesn’t come across as realistic to everyone.

But at this point, I think I’ll stop here. You have your opinion, I have mine and Atahalni has his. Hopefully you understand why some people aren’t on board with the emotional storytelling of Dragonflight though, and hopefully the examples given have helped you understand just how prevalent it is.

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9116

imagine if they hadn’t killed off koroleth the bald nelf primalist lady immediately and instead actually did something there

I guess they almost do it with the druids of the flames but the idea would hit stronger if the people going through it were allies and not enemies.

“Why should we have to reconcile? They’re the ones who suck.” - Talanji
“It’s not healthy? Yeah neither is chocolate but yum yum I’ll eat it all the same.” - Shandris.

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