Campaign And Story
While the campaign Storyline does not achieve the pacing of the Isle Of Dorn’s nor the emotional hits and excitement of The Ringing Deeps or Azj-Kahet - I still found it to be very enjoyable and it’s great to see a continuation of the trend towards larger campaigns with less timegating.
I also really liked to see the continued expansion in the volume of side storylines- particularly the group of Kobalds in The Ringing Deeps who are acting out their own version of the Arthurian Legend.
Overall the 11.1.0 experience manages to surpass the legion Argus campaign to create a new high water mark for major patch storylines which rivals that of a major expansion levelling zone - and as a lover of the open world questing/levelling experience I look forwards to this continuing.
The New Zone(s)
While I generally prefer the Alliance Aesthetics and storylines I have long been a fan of the goblin’s anarchic quirkiness and the new zone captures that very well.
Undermine rivals (and likely surpasses) Borlaus as the most well realised city on Azeroth. I like the variety of buildings and love the way that the vast majority can be entered and explored.
I also feel the designers have done a great job providing safer areas to just explore with more hostile area for gameplay.
While I liked the additional of outdoor sub zones to Zuldazar and The Ringing Deeps I feel that the use of loading screens between the zones and Undermine leads to a disconnected experience and I would have preferred to see Undermine set within a open world zone with a landing area to provide a more natural transition between the flying and no fly areas.
I also feel the use of a cinematic for the rocket drill ride is a missed opportunity to re using the deep run tram system (from Vanilla) to provide a much more epic transition. (Similar to the epic journey to Mimiron’s Lab in Ulduar).
D.R.I.V.E
I initially found the new DRIVE system a little awkward but after trying out a coupel of races it did grow on me and I do find the races enjoyable.
That said I regularly (Maybe 10-20% of the time) experience issues with the camera being locked at a slight downwards angle which severely limits visibility - which combined with there lack of integration into the mount journal - in my opinion means the system lacks polish.
I also feel that it tends to make the zone feel smaller in a way that neither flying nore Skyriding does (even in the smaller vanilla zones) - it’s hard to put my finger on why - but on reflection I think it’s due to the limitations in camera zoom/positioning (even when it’s working OK) which leads to a hemmed in feeling when travelling from objective tom objective.
Gameplay Loop
The new Shipping and Handling is the cool new take on questing mechanics - but the Surge pricing event very much feel like a solo event with the impact of other players only really noticeable in the bar.
As with all hourly timed events - the need to schedule my gameplay around it is inconvenient and often feels like the game is telling me it does not want me to play it, but in this case it lacks the benefit of other events in brining players together -meaning that the downsides here far outweigh the benefits.
The use of weekly quests and weekly rewards - creates a powerful psychological signal that the game only wants me to play in the open world once per week.
As with previous DF and WW seasons this will likely result in the content feeling like a weekly chore to get done on a Wednesday - leaving little to do in the open world for the rest of the week beyond rares and treasures - a persistent problem throughout Dragonfight and The War Within.
This is a shame as many of the gameplay features (from individual WQs through to the mini activities like SCRAP and Shipping and Handling) display a lot of innovation, but that isn’t translating into broader gameplay feel - which since 10.1.0 has - bluntly - been feeling quite stale.
The root cause of that stale feeling is IMV the overreliance on the Timeless Isles format of Rares and Treasures. While that was very successful at the time - this format is 10 years old now and that age is definitely showing.
The Future of Open World Content
In my view the OPen World could benefit from obvious enthusiasm and innovation that we see in individual quests and features (since Zereth Mortis) being harnessed and applied to the “Bigger picture” of the overall gameplay experience in new Mid expansion zones.
One way to do this would be for the team to set themselves a goal to construct a mid expansion with 0 rares, 0 treasures and 0 weekly “meta” quests (and rewards)
This constraint would be a forcing function to innovate more on the gameplay loop (adversity often accelerates innovation) and hopefully lead to the development of a more diverse toolkit of larger gameplay systems to apply in future zones.
I know the team likes to set up design pillars to guide development and as a play who enjoys open world content I’d love to see pillars around:
- Ensuring that there always feels like there is meaningful fresh content to do no matter how often a player logs in (similar to the way that Legion/BFA added new WQs every 6 hours)
- Ensuring that players can play the content when they want (Agressivly minimizing the need schedule gameplay around hourly events or AFK watching Netflix waiting for the two rares needed for a weekly quest to spawn).
- Ensuring that there is structure around the content to provide natural breakpoints (similar to the Legion/BfA emissary system which encouraged self limiting the number of qorld quests one did).
- No more quests which as us to "do x other quests " (excluding the rotating “weekend” events)