The Darkthyr are a lore-void

Lore Story
1

When Dragonflight launched, I was quite excited to dig into the drakthyr and their class and lore. From the trailers, they seemed to be the guardians of the dragon isles, created by Neltharion in an hour of need, in stasis though unknown means and awakened at last by that stone guy.

The Dragonflights themselves have rich lore. You could RP any dragon colour and know their history, personality, culture, looks and feels. So I was looking forward to what they would come up with. I hadn’t that high hopes, since the last few years proved that they can’t write their way out of a paper bag. But even I didn’t expect this.

I can’t feel my character our or accurate roleplay them because…
We got nothing. Let’s go over it all.

  • The drakthyr have no history.

Aside from some vague imagery of regiments of drakthyr being blown up by primalists and then being freed from titan control. What do we know of them? They group up in sort of… subfactions but these quickly evaporate and become irrelevant. They have no historic battles, weren’t present for much of the known lore, don’t even seem to know the other dragons of the Aspects. They are blank slates, they themselves ‘don’t remember’ but let’s not hold our breath for some great revelation in the future, lest we have a second coming of the Jailor’s Grand Plan and all the height of intelligent writing that was.

  • The Drakthyr have no culture

Supposedly, they were some manner of warrior race or special soldiers created by Neltharion. This would imply they would have a warrior culture. Strength, honour, courage. A no-nonsense approach to things. But this isn’t true. They feel like bland reactionists that come into the world and have nothing to say about it. How were they organised? Did they worship anything? Did they form bonds? What’s their architecture? What’re their social norms? Their creed? Beliefs? Nothing. I got nothing. They’re blank. Entirely blank. Every drakthyr you speak to feels like talking to some random guy in the street. “Ohwow, that explosion was pretty big. Let’s go see.” instead of “Look, signs of battle! I have longed to fight again, my claws ache. Into the fray!”. Could even be fun if the fire was an engineering mishap. “What is this… metal abomination…”
This would add character, but nope. Nada, zilch.

  • The Drakthyr have no homeland

Turns out the dragon isles are entirely alien to them. They barely seemed to know the Forbidden Reach. Sure, 20,000 years is a long time but not even a “I used to have watch right there on that mountain… strange to see it collapsed into the sea like that…”. So where are they from? Native to nowhere. They’ll probably try to spin it and say the Reach was their home but how can an army protect the isles if they have never been there. No place to call home, no landscape to call familiar, no building to call their own.
They’re homeless.

  • The Drakthyr have no clear biology

If I asked you “How are drakthyr born?” you couldn’t answer. You could speculate sure but what is the answer? From eggs? From cloning or experiment vats? From magic? I dunno! And why are they so lanky and skinny? Dragons are massive and huge and the old trolls they must have been made from were tall and strong too. And why do males and females - if they have sexes even - look the same? Like… exactly the same? How does that work? I list it here since not even knowing basic things about how they work or live is just another void.

  • The Drakthyr visages are blood elves

Which didn’t exist back then, 20,000 years ago. So what gives? And why only elves? Isn’t it innate to the dragons to be able to blend in perfectly with mortals? Wasn’t that the whole point of visages? Why do they even need one? Back then, they wouldn’t have needed a visage. And don’t tell me it’ll be explained. Lest again… we assume there’s some brilliant reveal coming. Danuser will probably just come out and say “You see… the drakthyr are blood elves because they used their powers to see that people like those and so because we’re laz… I mean because of that, only blood elves.” And we’ll all be sitting there, disappointed. Again.

  • The Drakthyr’s powers are vague

Supersoldiers with the powers of all flights. That sounded pretty rad to me. Pretty potent. But euh… how does that work exactly, outside of some few spells? I haven’t seen them use an arsenal of their gifts in the story. And lorewise, how do they scale? Because something with that amount of power, should be pretty dangerous. And why are there so few black dragon spells? How did Neltharion even do this 20,000 years ago when his own son failed so recently?

  • The Drakthyr’s personalities are random

Whatever the setting or plot demands, drakthyr can be it. Soldiers, ok. Musicians, sure. Students, aight. Quidditch players, aeehm. Quirky golly jee goofballs… that doesn’t really… Childlike weaklings? Bruh, what part of “Supersoldiers created by Deathwing” didn’t Danuner remember after writing it literally himself? They’re all over the f’ing place, man.

  • The Drakthyr’s story quests add nothing.

In these very brief, very boring quests you only find out things you already knew upon character creation. Lel?! “We got imprisoned with magical aid from Malygos” Gee, ya think? I didn’t get that when Malygos’ guards tried to keep us inside. “Neltharion creates us from morals and dragons.” You don’t say! You mean like it says on the character creation icon? Holy sheet mang. Who write this.

And with this I submit that they are a writing failure on pretty much every front. Vapid, empty, nonsensical, vague and inconsistent. And worst of all… such a failed potential.

10 Likes
2

They’ve learned to use visage after moving with Ebonhorn/Wrathion into Org/SW and blatantly not blending in. As to why their visages are based on Blelf male and Human female i would wager it’s purely a technical/gameplay limitation. (Even tho we see Alex using her blelf form, in context of the dragon wars which are dated to before elves evolved wholesale, for the purposes of recognisability.)

3

They seem to be designed to be blank slates, yes. Perfect for the player to project whatever they want upon their Dracthyr. If the goal was to create an interesting addition to the lore, I’d agree that they failed. But if they just wanted to crete another random adventurer template that doesn’t have any personal conflict they’d have to work around in future quest lines, which seems far more likely to me, then I think they succeeded.

From a RPer perspective I find them much more easily acceptable than pushing armored necromancers, infectious werewolves, half-demons and void-slaves on us… Sure, would have been nice if the Dracthyr had gotten at least the depth that Pandaren got back in their days, but “bland” doesn’t really hurt my immersion, at least.

2 Likes
4

Yea but you say it yourself. They are not the void elves. Void elves exist because people complained about high elves. They have no lore, they make no sense, they are stupid. And that’s fine, they’re just meant for people on alliance who wanted elves. I dunno why they caved on that but whatever. Nobody made a void elf for RP.

Drakthyr are not that. Sure, they’re a stretch but they have some manner of origin story, the blending of dragon types has been a theme before, they’re a focal point of the expansion and they should NOT have been lore-voids at all. People might’ve wanted to get into character with these, or felt out some manner of place in the lore. And it’s all missing.

Letting the player fill it all in themselves and project is the definition of lazy writing and lack of lore.

1 Like
5

How is that different from making Dracthyr, just because people wanted another race, though? The lack of care for the lore is the same, as is the motivation for their creation being tied to player concerns instead of world-building. I mean, you can say that the Dracthyr had more potential than the Void Elves ever had, but that’s just arguing hypotheticals. I’ll certainly grant you the point, that they squandered some of the lore potential the Dracthyr had. I just don’t think they care, because they weren’t created for their lore.

And there you are sadly wrong. The devs decided to make up some horrible lore that they took seriously. And the playerbase took up that lore, and Void Elves are as much a part of RP as of anything else. Though giving them High Elf colouring options helped reduce the number of explicitly Void Elf characters to a less loathsome level.

And my answer to that was: Blizzard was more interested in giving you a blank slate than a well-written story. You can call that lazy writing, but I’d rather call it a design decision against your preferences.

2 Likes
6

Yea whatever man. I say it was all lazy writing yet again. The rest is semantics.

2 Likes
7

Blizzard caved because for RP purposes (and it indeed made sense for the general direction of the Blood Elf story since the end of TBC), A LOT of RPing Blood Elf players REALLY wanted to play characters with blue eyes (not just golden), because of the Light of the Sunwell slowly purifying the fel out of most of them during the years, and because half of the Sunwell is made of arcane magic (which main colours are shades of blue-purple) directly infusing the Blood Elves since a lot of years ago.

But being blue eyes the prominent feature of the High Elf of the Alliance historically, they knew that would have caused a huge uproar in the Alliance playerbase without giving them anything in exchange for playable Blood Elves with blue eyes (and other colors aside green and gold, like purple too)

So they had to cave and make a exiled faction of Blood Elf playable (not the historical High Elves who the Alliance playerbase really wanted) playable in the Alliance with the Void angle and feature that they thought was a success in Alleria’s story at the end of Legion. But I guess they had to write their lore and make them playable very quickly, like probably only a few months before BfA was going to come out, so they scrambled it a lot and it resulted in a huge mess, that also partly badly affected Blood Elf lore, because magical prohibitionism isn’t really something that the Blood Elves would do even with a dangerous type of magic that could badly affect the Sunwell like the Void, Rommath would probably take a lot of precautions about it but not really outright exile a faction of elves who wanted to study it to defend Quel’thalas even better.

And that’s basically the main reason Void Elf lore is still so luckluster, and indeed quite…“void”. even nowadays…

8

People asked for High Elves. Ion didn’t wanna give the impression that Activision actually gives into player demand so they gave us void elves instead. Yeh. Lazy.

1 Like
9

I’m going to have a rant.

So much of the little drips of lore we have ingame on Dracthyr are almost seemingly put in place there to annoy us.

There are Dracthyr player-only quests in Azure Span, which the Dracthyr character goes through with Emberthal… which appear to lead up to some big reveal, or at the very least a teaser suggesting a big reveal further down the line.

Instead, what we get at the end is literally more “revelations” about what we ALREADY know. Stuff that had already been mentioned beforehand - it’s like the developers have forgotten their own game.

There are trash mobs in one of the dungeons (Academy if you’re interested) that mention the Dracthyr Renaissance. That sounds cool as hell. Where the hell is that? Nope. It’s never brought up or mentioned ever again.

The flavour text on our class weapon (Kharnalex) from the first raid reads “call upon the light of the first Dracthyr…” again, that sounds super interesting, please elaborate more?

This is all evidence that they clearly, without doubt THOUGHT about the race lore, but couldn’t be assed further.

One could indeed argue that this is all foreshadowing for “future lore to come” - but in order for that to really follow through, some decent foundations for the lore need to be laid in place beforehand.

The Evoker starting area is woefully bereft of many Easter eggs or tidbits. You just fight your way out of your cave and have a brief battle with Primalists - blatantly ignoring the elephant in the room which is that the player has obviously chosen a Dracthyr Evoker to play, so this is the key point where you introduce them to the world of that race. This is the first impression the player gets of their chosen race and it’s lacking to a shameful extent.

By contrast let’s have a look at the Demon Hunter starting area. My god that was incredible. Point-of-view cutscenes, a well thought out introduction experience, player choices, character deaths.

Much like DHs, Dracthyr were frozen in stasis. It had the perfect launch point story-wise to be a better version of the DH story and zone.

Instead, it just feels like a rushed, solo-queue mini-scenario.

Crap.

3 Likes
10

What kind of technical limitation? You literally have toys that transform you into any other race.

2 Likes
11

Those take existing models. Dracthyr customisation is already very extensive and spread across 3 different animation rigs. For each additional race you’d need 2 rigs, with roughly equivalent amount and quality of assets. Aka an absolute nightmare of a workload.

12

But that is if we assume that it takes 2 rigs and not that it just switches from 1 to another, with animation of transition in between.

13

I’m talking about the visage forms atm you have the assets on blelf male and human female. The’d have to do the same work all over again to make it fit any other of the PC rigs.

14

I was talking about same thing.

15

Like theoretically it’s possible to apply Nightborne assets onto a Worgen rig, but it looks very very wierd. Meaning they’d basically have to do all the stuff they did for BlelfM and HumanF models all over again, on a race which already starts out with way more customisation than any previously introduced.

(Can’t post pictures, but it’s easy enough to google the nightborne worgen thing)

16

They just need to allow all other races as is. No extra customisation needed.

17

From a lore point, a lot of their history is really tied to the vanilla raid in BlackRock keep. Deathwing and his son were experimenting on creating chromatic flights and all sorts of mutations.
Nefarion (the son) failed and was defeated but it shows that Neltharion (Deathwing) succeeded and had more knowledge

He was trying to create the perfect Dragon soldier by combining all aspects powers. As he was swayed by the void he asked Malygos (blue Aspect) to seal them in statis until the time of need … Shortly after that he went mad and became Deathwing!

So yes although there is no culture, there is lore.

2 Likes
18

That’s really flimsy. All my points still stand. This is the barest of barebones. If it didn’t have even this flimsy bit of background, they would quite literally have come out of nowhere.

Think about it. Your second paragraph of a few lines sums up all we know about them. If that isn’t the definition of lore-void, I dunno what is.

19

It’s probably one of those things, where they have a relatively strong concept, but don’t have the balls to go all in and see it through. The genetically engineered supersoldiers have legs to stand on, if you show some of the conflicts or battles they’ve partaken in and pass on any semblance of culture at all. The problem is it wouldn’t gel with the degenerate idea that all races/cultures have to abide by the South California big city upper middle class far left virtue signal moral compass.

Because God forbid that walking corpses, nigh immortal mana addicts, Apache minotaurs, various trolls, stubborn drunken midgets, literal genetically engineered supersoldiers, victorian English werewolves, medieval European knights and so forth have different perspectives and values… :man_facepalming:

3 Likes
20

I wish this weren’t part of the issue but it actually might be. I am reminded of something some dude said online that in order to think, you have to risk being offensive. And this culture, a culture of supersoldiers from a bygone era would probably be quite offensive in nature to the other races.

The way I imagine them first would be haughty, because they’re long-lived powerful dragonkin who were around before any of the mortal races aside from trolls. They would be no-nonsense, kill first questions later hierarchical structure where discipline obedience and loyalty to Neltharion comes first.

“You say you come to free us and that our patron lost his mind. I say we broke free on our own and you are worried your slaying of our great general would make us your enemy. And you’re right… I suggest you leave here.”

After that they could become a recluse faction that barely works with the other factions, doing their own things. Continuing their unabated war against the primalists with zeal and fervour. As warlike as the orcs and as vain as the elves.

Then slowly, they learn the world moved on. And after some defeats and hard lesson, they begin to change.

To anyone with brains, this sounds cool. To the mind of a woke writer, this sounds dark, offensive and very much the wrong message.

Ugh.

2 Likes