Dragonflight Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Ersula]

Really curious what comes after this... also the wording "Eternity's End" sounds like the expansion after this will be a sort of reset of some sorts.

Like I said, a big button that can rewrite any part of reality? Absolutely. At the very least if they tore down the walls between life & death then that would both open up the Shadowlands races as allied races & then death would feel more permanent. How it works now effectively everyone has two lives. Die in the shadowlands & your ineffable soul returns to the Twisting Neather, how it's supposed to.

And Sylvanas would have succeeded at what she vowed: "The World is a Prison & I will set us all free"

[Foreign Exchange Ztudent]

Too bad filler xpacs cost as much as big xpacs

Well this is a special circumstance, right? It's not like wait a second.. Their next expansion is a Cataclysm level expansion with extreme requirement for more developers to execute a post-launch content cycle. Wait a second, it's a complete Revamp of Azeroth and it will release in Q4 2022. Meanwhile the Development Team is going to Churn and Burnout like crazy once more while working from Home.

Sounds like we've got a winner in Q4 2022, guys! Surely they will have 3 Major Content Patches in a 70 day period inbetween!

[Jokubas]

The logical endpoint for the saga was Legion, how they can say the Jailer is a satisfying end to expansions like BfA, MoP or Cata is beyond me.

Yeah, Legion felt like the culmination in a lot of ways. Not just the fact that Sargeras and the Legion had been set up as the main villains for a long time, but that Legion dredged up a lot of old plot threads in its artifact questlines and side quests and finally resolved them. The Chronicle coming out in time for it set up the Void as being a further culmination just past the Legion, but overall the expansion still felt like the end of an era.

What really bothers me about Shadowlands is that feel like I should have felt similarly. I am still convinced that Shadowlands was built on some legitimate old seeds. I've gone into detail about it before, but for now I'll just say that I predicted Zovaal's existence (no details of course) before Battle for Azeroth even came out. The Jailer's machinations really are based on old mysteries and unresolved plot threads. The problem is that the story has completely and utterly failed to utilize them in any clear or meaningful way. The Jailer should have felt like he had been there all along and we were only now starting to see the strings he was pulling, but instead he feels completely standalone and honestly like he didn't even really do anything until we got there. It's really disappointing seeing such potential go so thoroughly unused.

[EbaumsTipster]

“Shadowlands was cut short” is the biggest smoothbrain take I’ve seen in a while, and literally the only evidence we have is Baine having no plotline so far.

The armor for the act 2 raid was in the files at launch....

[Nyel]

I mean Azshara was kept for the future. What can 10.0 be that she will still play a role in it?

[EbaumsTipster]

I mean Azshara was kept for the future. What can 10.0 be that she will still play a role in it?

Fighting Nelves and the Horde to reclaim Kalimdor seems likely. She still has an empire.

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Do you have a link to the interview?

https://www.millenium.org/news/383835.html

[Nyel]

“Shadowlands was cut short” is the biggest smoothbrain take I’ve seen in a while, and literally the only evidence we have is Baine having no plotline so far.

The armor for the act 2 raid was in the files at launch....

The only time an expansion had only two content patches was WoD (if you call 6.1 a content patch). So compared to each and every expansion before, Shadowlands definitely was cut short, even if it was always meant to be like this.

[Foreign Exchange Ztudent]

Sad to see they decided to make Class Sets attainable from Mythic+ and PVP indicating that the idea of Mythic+ Sets is probably gone out the door.

It just feels weird too, honestly. It was a reward from Raiding and now it has lost its' purpose.

[EbaumsTipster]

The only time an expansion had only two content patches was WoD (if you call 6.1 a content patch). So compared to each and every expansion before, Shadowlands definitely was cut short, even if it was always meant to be like this.

It wasn’t “cut short” if it was always planned to be a short expansion.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I felt like MoP 5.4 was more of the endpoint of WoW. The Legion was a TFT plot thread that became less and less important as WoW went on. Kil'jaeden's defeat in BC made it feel like "yeah, we blew up Archimonde and pushed back Kil'jaeden and liberated Outland. The Legion won't be coming back for a long time, and if they do, we'll easily beat them back anyway", so I felt like there wasn't really a need for a Legion expansion. By the end of MoP 5.4, pretty much all of the plotlines that had begun in WC3 had been wrapped up in some way or another. Not all of them wrapped up satisfactorily, but all were wrapped up. Starting with WoD, the story begins using contrivances to keep bringing back old threats because the creators didn't have the imagination to create new stories and villains (and probably because corporate wanted to capitalize on WC3 brand name recognition like Grommash/Illidan/Sylvanas). Shadowlands had the potential to be great as we were exploring brand new material, and it didn't need to be shoehorned back into the old WoW story.

[Ersula]

“Shadowlands was cut short” is the biggest smoothbrain take I’ve seen in a while, and literally the only evidence we have is Baine having no plotline so far.

The armor for the act 2 raid was in the files at launch....

Devs who have left Blizzard have already explained they always plan a "filler" major raid patch that they can abandon if they get behind on development. Surely something like "Battle For Ardenweald" was planned to have been a whole raid tier with all the Elune lore, but got dropped when the biggest pandemic of our lifetimes hit. So they just crammed the related story stuff into 9.1

[Osmeric]

Yeah, Legion felt like the culmination in a lot of ways. Not just the fact that Sargeras and the Legion had been set up as the main villains for a long time, but that Legion dredged up a lot of old plot threads in its artifact questlines and side quests and finally resolved them. The Chronicle coming out in time for it set up the Void as being a further culmination just past the Legion, but overall the expansion still felt like the end of an era.

What really bothers me about Shadowlands is that feel like I should have felt similarly. I am still convinced that Shadowlands was built on some legitimate old seeds. I've gone into detail about it before, but for now I'll just say that I predicted Zovaal's existence (no details of course) before Battle for Azeroth even came out. The Jailer's machinations really are based on old mysteries and unresolved plot threads. The problem is that the story has completely and utterly failed to utilize them in any clear or meaningful way. The Jailer should have felt like he had been there all along and we were only now starting to see the strings he was pulling, but instead he feels completely standalone and honestly like he didn't even really do anything until we got there. It's really disappointing seeing such potential go so thoroughly unused.

Cosmic story lines have difficulty engaging players. There is just not the identification with and sympathy for the characters and their problems.

The comic book industry discovered this decades ago ... I think it was the 70s? There was a move back to smaller scale, more relateable stories.

[Ersula]

I felt like MoP 5.4 was more of the endpoint of WoW...

People only say that because it feels bad now. Then Legion happened. And of course they didn't have all this planned 15 years ago, that's just indicative of all franchises. They definitely didn't plan MoP when TBC was being designed. It's just the nature of any franchise.

[EbaumsTipster]

"It was always intended short"
"They just never mentioned it until the moment the expansion would end"
"

Why would they tell their customers an expansion would be shorter than usual? “Because it’s the right thing to do”?

[Ersula]

"It was always intended short"
"They just never mentioned it until the moment the expansion would end"
"They also totally planned always to be the final epic conlusion of their "saga"

They always say this. They never admit when they abandoned content that's why you have to see what former employees say. People literally found alternate corrupted WoD maps in the data but they have never admited WoD was cut short. When it clearly was.

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this was posted a few days ago on reddit. Now, it got the patch's name wrong, but that logo is VERY similar to the one that actually released. Do we have our expansion name?

It's just teal. Stop posting that crappy shop: It's full of spelling errors. Eternity was just pretty obvious based on Zovaal's dialog.

[Arcinatoss]

EbaumsTipster is just huffing a fresh batch of HYPER-COPIUM

[EbaumsTipster]

EbaumsTipster is just huffing a fresh batch of HYPER-COPIUM

I’ve been posting this shit since the fucking expansion was announced (that it was tiny filler before world revamp) and I absolutely LOVE being vindicated.

[Jokubas]

They always say this. They never admit when they abandoned content that's why you have to see what former employees say. People literally found alternate corrupted WoD maps in the data but they have never admited WoD was cut short. When it clearly was.

That reminds me of a postmortem article they did on Cataclysm, I believe it was. Usually postmortems are the place where creators will admit the things that didn't go as planned or changed, and honestly fans eat that sort of thing up. Instead the Cataclysm postmortem was entirely about how amazing the expansion was and how it went exactly how they wanted, which just obviously wasn't true.

I mean, Cataclysm was an expansion where we were told that Azshara definitely wasn't in it (after her being said to have a key role on the official site), but she actually still totally was, not just a quick appearance in a quest but as a boss in the Caverns of Time. There are a million other details besides that.

It's sort of frustrating because, like I said, fans often eat that sort of thing up. They don't need to be as embarrassed about it as they act.

[Raven]

So my speculation is they want next story to be start back in Azeroth so my quess would be,

Next story starts of with Azeroth waking up and leaving and we are stuck on just a normal planet but the zones is somehow changed in Azeroth birth.

[Nyel]

It wasn’t “cut short” if it was always planned to be a short expansion.

For Blizzard it wasn't cut short, for the players it was.