At the end of the day it is my firm belief that an MMO should just be a fun fantasy game that’s a glorified chat room with a fun game strapped on the side.
Dragonflight looks like it’s working towards that, but this talk of bards and taverns, there’s so much potential for things they could do! 
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It not new thing. Blizzard spend time on time limited content but content that lasts years gets very little attention. Just look at the holiday events, very little has changed since I completed then in 2010. Darkmoon faire is every month but gets updates every two years, if we’re lucky. Archaeology has massive potential for a lore encyclopedia but the most we have had in recent years were weekly quests back in Legion.
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Yeah.
I think they might be realising evergreen content is the way to go (look at Fated raids and bringing mage tower back).
Constantly making the game bigger while more of it becomes irrelevant is dumb, always has been and imo it’s always been one of Wow’s worst design choices.
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Bard is very unlikley. Mor likley to get Tinker as a new class. Tho next class gonna be totally random as always.
Yeah basically.
I really hope so!
I hope Dragonflight shows that “evergreen” content is king.
Hell, FFXIV already shows that, and it surely didn’t go unnoticed, and the statements on the talent trees are a very good sign, now let’s see if they actually do content that can be played in a non-deprecated state for years on.
This expansion will show how much they have been taking notes, I fully expect Dragonriding for example being brought forward for previous mounts and even maybe starting to make something to ground mounts so they also have locomotion mechanics (I would dislike it a lot if they made it like FFXIV honestly, it looks so lame).
The devs already said Archaeology is going to change to work differently, but it sadly will not come out until the first patch, I hope it’s good and makes the profession interesting and updated to be hold for many years and adds a whole new layer of immersion.
The Mage Tower is something they took out of the “deprecated” bin and brought up again, and I hope it’s not abandoned after Shadowlands and is scaled for us to be able to play it even in 7 years.
There’s just so much old content that could be brought again, and even if it’s not the old content but new one that’s designed to last for several expansions just imagine how much we could have had since let’s say Legion.
Who knows, maybe they are planning something for the Classic continents to “start again” in a way and build up the game with a new philosophy instead of this “use and throw” way to do things they so proudly praised since Legion.
Whilst I’m skeptical it will happen, as this is still activision blizzard, I have a strong feeling and theory that Dragonflight is more of a “transition” to a new style of Wow gameplay, and then 11.0 will be a massive overhaul of the content and world to coincide with the 20th anniversary.
As people love to say, these aren’t the same devs that made WoW, they’re the devs who got into this industry BECAUSE of Wow, and now I do believe we’re finally starting to see the fruits of their passion and labour.
Though I also believe the new dev team can’t work to their potential under Ion as lead director and Danuser as lead of narrative.
I thought the same but honestly I really liked Ion lately on how he appeared on the last interviews about Dragonflight, as if he approaches things very differently than before, and I consider season 4 a great sucess, it’s a nice way to have some content on the end of an expansion, I think he has talent and he might have made mistakes in the past with certain things but it seems like this time his plans are quite different.
But I can’t say the same about Danuser, I mean… He would have to had his hands VERY tied to justify what happened the last 4 years.
Any time I hear him on an interview I really feel like he’s just inventing as he speaks, as if he doesn’t take it so seriously and doesn’t care to have consistency, just look at what he says only regarding Dragonflight, the Taliesin&Evitel interview on Twitter and Dracthyr visage forms, the extremely vague statements about things like how and why these new centaurs exist in the timeframe that’s been presented (we might see yet ANOTHER lazy retcon), the way he tailors settings in such a vague way as if he doesn’t spend more than fifteen minutes for each story beat to be thought of (honestly, doesn’t anyone think the introduction to the Dragon Isles could have been done… Less out of the blue or something?), or basically how vague everything seems to be regarding the lore, Shadowlands still needs so much world building it’s no mistery it still kinda feels so strange for the Warcraft setting…
It’s just my thought on it, as I can’t see anything but what’s presented, I don’t know how things are in their work, maybe Danuser is too strained by things we don’t know thus his work looks and feels this way, but man, it’s surely such a disservice for this fantasy world that’s been so influential and big and very loved by many through so much time.
While I do agree, his passion for his work has been shining since the dev team came out of the wood work en masse with Dragonflight’s announcement, he’s been nerding out in interviews with Asmongold etc.
But at the end of the day he’s a systems guy, he’s a raid designer, that’s his area of expertise and that’s what he’s passionate about, I don’t think he really cares about the quality of the wider world/story etc.
If you look to certain other games, their lead producer is passionate for the whole product rather than just one part.
And Danuser is completely incompetent, maybe you’re right, maybe the work flow for development has just been so terrible that his stories have translated terribly to the game.
I actually don’t hate the idea of the stories we’ve had from him, especially Shadowlands, it had tons of potential, but in-game none of the characters were compelling and everything was lazily and sloppily connected to the rest of established lore.
I’ve seen some genuinely compelling characters and writing in some of the side quests that I’ve seen on the alpha, so if side quest characters can be compelling, I don’t think Steve has any excuse if the main plot falls flat on it’s bum again.
Warcraft has never had a grand narrative, it never really had particularly great writing, but it was a fun world to be in and had good gameplay.
for 7 years now the gameplay has been on the decline, there’s been bigger gaps between patches, so people have been able to rip into the story more as there’s been less to distract from it.
Add in the fact other games have been delivering a full product of solid gameplay AND story, it’s easier to criticize Wow for it’s poor story now than it was back in 2004.
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