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If there’s anything to bring back lost WoW players, it’s probably dragons
A little cynical about this, World of Warcraft: Dragonflight is exactly the kind of expansion you’d expect from an MMO that’s dwindling in popularity. It’s like a DJ spinning the party rock anthem after their moody Chicago house track fails to move the dance floor. Desperate play? Maybe. But you know you want to party rock just a little bit.
Everyone loves dragons, and Dragonflight adds not only a dragon ride, but a playable dragon clan. Dragon Rider! There are no modest excuses here. Still, 18 years later, I think Blizzard and WoW fans have gotten a little dragon expansion as a treat. As if World of Warcraft wasn’t specifically about picking low-hanging fruit. Ten years ago, The Disclosure was the Pandaren race. Cataclysm added goblins. I like pandas and goblins, but not Dungeons and Pandas, and Bruce Lee wasn’t famous in Into the Goblin. Dragons are fabulous A-listers.
not everyone On the World of Warcraft subreddit Think the new playable Delacier race looks cool. I’ve seen them described as “dissonant”, “embarrassing”, “ugly” and “horrible”. However, some fans seem to be at least cautiously optimistic that Blizzard can succeed with Dragonflight by refocusing on the fundamentals: it’s a dragon expansion that includes dragons, dragons, dragons, and dragonriding, and a UI revamp after 18 years, Professional overhaul.
“We obviously don’t know the details, so maybe what they’re creating is still bad, but I think it’s a good sign that people are recognizing that some fundamental (if not sexy) change needs to happen,” said a commenter.
One detail I like is that riding the dragon actually involves flying the dragon around Dragon Island as if you were controlling a plane. Reminds me of Larian’s underrated Divinity: Dragon Commander, not because World of Warcraft’s dragoons look so much like that, but because there are so many Dragonborn games. There’s the Panzer Dragoon, you can drive dragon beasts in Middle-earth: Shadow of War, Skyrim: Dragonborn, and a few others, but it’s not that anyone is exhausted by it, even if you’d think some cool Something riding a dragon will be everywhere.
Interestingly, the designers of World of Warcraft prefer to say that players will “move through the air” rather than “fly” on their drake, since flying in WoW already refers to using a flying mount, while Young dragons are a characteristic of Dragon Island. Squeezing new dragon stuff into an 18-year-old game is tricky.
Another, more controversial difference is that the Delasir race will be limited to a special new class created just for Delasir. The explanation is that there isn’t a good way to combine the Dracthyr’s unique physical abilities – mostly wings – with the existing class types, so they have to use the new Evoker class. Game director Ion Hazzikostas said the Evoker class combines the magical abilities of Dracthyr with their physical ability to strafe and flap their wings on the battlefield to repel gusts of wind, as two examples.
It’s a little disappointing that you can’t play as a dragon rogue or dragon monk, like your dragonborn in D&D, where racial and class traits coexist. On the other hand, if the alternative is that World of Warcraft’s Delacier just plays like scaly humans, then maybe setting boundaries that emphasize their dragonlike nature is the right thing to do, even if that limits their long-term appeal. Still, this is one of the least welcome aspects of the announcement so far. Some wondered why Blizzard wouldn’t let Dracthyr choose other classes as long as they remained in human form.
At this point, I think Dragonflight’s best feature — or at least, the most likely popular one — is probably the fact that Dracthyr has both a humanoid “face” form and a dragon form. Both are customizable, so you can basically create two characters: a horned humanoid and a large naked dragon. I’ve been on the internet long enough to know that people are eager to embody both ends of the spectrum. Shapeshifting is always fun; I couldn’t play through Divinity: Original Sin 2 without picking up the Shapeshifter’s mask.
Dracthyr’s appearance, however, is another subject of much complaint. Some people absolutely hate dragon bodies, and even among those who don’t completely reject Blizzard’s idea of what a naked winged lizard should look like, I’ve seen complaints that they’re too slender. Perhaps one downside of focusing on a creature as popular as a dragon is that there are a lot of pre-existing perceptions of what they should look like. It’s like trying to tell my nieces, the world’s foremost authority on mermaids, about mermaids. I am always wrong.
To me, Dracthyr looks like what you’d expect from a dragon in World of Warcraft, orcs are green guys with bites: kind of normal, cartoony, and nice.
I wonder if a more common reaction would turn out to be lapsed WoW player and CCG pro Brian Kibler, who joke on twitter He might consider going back to World of Warcraft just to play the dragon. This feels like a good sign, and while I’ve only really dabbled in World of Warcraft over the years, the content of this expansion is simple enough that even I can understand it. It’s about dragons: ride them, be them, because everyone loves them. If there’s an expansion theme better suited to bring back lapsed WoW players, I don’t know what it is. Hope it delivers.
World of Warcraft: Dragon Legion doesn’t have a release date yet, but there will be an alpha version soon. We have gathered all the details here.
Me: “I stopped playing Warcraft ten years ago and I won’t be back.” Blizzard: “Now you can play Dragon!” Me: 😳😳😳 https://t.co/ZLrhXYTU4MApril 19, 2022