Gameplay's great, but a few story rants

[Reinhart11]

I would like more focus and information on elemental magics in this expansion. Is there a major difference in the primal elemental magic the Incarnates and their proto drakes use in comparison to the ways elemental magic is used in the past and so far by the races, where the elements play a big part.

These elemental stones, like the one that infuses Drakonid Garrosh, i mean Eranog, are interesting as well.

Another story that caught my interest is the gnoll/decay storyline. I would like to see some potential Forsaken interest and involvement here.

[Skytotem]

I would like more focus and information on elemental magics in this expansion. Is there a major difference in the primal elemental magic the Incarnates and their proto drakes use in comparison to the ways elemental magic is used in the past and so far by the races, where the elements play a big part.

These elemental stones, like the one that infuses Drakonid Garrosh, i mean Eranog, are interesting as well.

Another story that caught my interest is the gnoll/decay storyline. I would like to see some potential Forsaken interest and involvement here.

I think one of Blizz's big weaknesses is that they don't really do much detail for magic, there's no meaningful difference between the arcane magic practiced by the blue dragons in the nexus with all their cool blue math runes, and the magic practiced by the kirin tor... and the magic practiced by say, a Zandalari or Forsaken mage, even though there should be at least SOME stylistic variations. I hope they expand on how the elemental powers the Primalists are using might be different from the shamanism and elemental-arcane stuff mages have been using for years.

The decay stuff is interesting because that was usually associated with 'dark shamanism' though I still think their handling of decay has been... weird.

[Super Dickmann]

I would like more focus and information on elemental magics in this expansion. Is there a major difference in the primal elemental magic the Incarnates and their proto drakes use in comparison to the ways elemental magic is used in the past and so far by the races, where the elements play a big part.

Weirdly, I think that's one of its bigger successes in that the elements they're using aren't different and aren't presented as such. The natural world on that scale that they represent is volatile and not on your side. It can be helpful or destructive, but it doesn't really bother with you. It's something alluded to before, but muddled in Cataclysm with how some elementals were bound whereas others were Old God collaborators, but here you've a fairly clear, consistent portrayal of how the elements are actually described at the start of Chronicle. The Primalists aren't bending peaceful powers to evil ends, they're just directing the point where an uncaring nature takes its course, fitting with what their end goal is.

[Cheezits]

Weirdly, I think that's one of its bigger successes in that the elements they're using aren't different and aren't presented as such.

I have to disagree with this point. The elementals are very different and have different aesthetics entirely (the rocks have a completely different look and color compared to Therazane and co.), and they seem to have intentionally made it so no Firelands/Skywall/Abyssal Maw/Deepholm creatures appear.

I noticed that one of the quests mentions they are bringing these powers from the planes, but if that's the case why in the world do they look and act nothing like the forces of the Elemental Lords? I don't think this is a retcon or redesign either.

[Super Dickmann]

I have to disagree with this point. The elementals are very different and have different aesthetics entirely (the rocks have a completely different look and color compared to Therazane and co.), and they seem to have intentionally made it so no Firelands/Skywall/Abyssal Maw/Deepholm creatures appear.

I noticed that one of the quests mentions they are bringing these powers from the planes, but if that's the case why in the world do they look and act nothing like the forces of the Elemental Lords? I don't think this is a retcon or redesign either.

It's just new models being used, there's not much more to it. The Cataclysm-era models are over ten years old at this point and the new ones look better. There's nothing temperamentally different about the elementals compared to others we've seen before.

Though tying in with an earlier point re: decay, this could be the first sop we got to the part mentioned about how Azeroth has an absence of spirit, i.e decay's opposite because of how big the world soul is, resulting in elemental volatility. Given DF includes both volatile elementals and decay I suspect they'll get into both of these fairly soon.

[Jindujun]

Once i met the third gay couple before even hitting lvl 65 i stopped reading all the quests. Blizz has gone completely woke this expansion.

I don't really mind the LGBTQ+ inclusion in wow but the quests themselves are puzzling to me.
I mean, include gay couples everywhere but does every quest involving them have to do with love? Where's my quest where i fight side by side with two gay characters?
I like the way ESO does it with a mention here and there, where an NPC is talking about partner of the same sex like it is the most common thing in the world.
And the wow quests are more like "I love my partner, get me a gift", "I tell this person i love them. Oh they love me back and tell me at the same time? ROMCOM LOL" or "These girls are cute, help me date them". It feels so weird, like it's written by a person who things being gay is about being in love all the time.
ie. Good start Blizzard! But work better with the inclusion! More organic relationships!!(and no, I'm not making a dryad pun)

[Aucald]

I don't really mind the LGBTQ+ inclusion in wow but the quests themselves are puzzling to me.
I mean, include gay couples everywhere but does every quest involving them have to do with love? Where's my quest where i fight side by side with two gay characters?
I like the way ESO does it with a mention here and there, where an NPC is talking about partner of the same sex like it is the most common thing in the world.
And the wow quests are more like "I love my partner, get me a gift", "I tell this person i love them. Oh they love me back and tell me at the same time? ROMCOM LOL" or "These girls are cute, help me date them". It feels so weird, like it's written by a person who things being gay is about being in love all the time.
ie. Good start Blizzard! But work better with the inclusion! More organic relationships!!(and no, I'm not making a dryad pun)

There's a good example in the Azure Span where you're helping two members of the Kirin Tor, both women (a Gilnean and Night Elf), with an issue concerning wildlife and arcane contamination due to malfunctioning ley lines and the like. The Gilnean is a by-the-book no-nonsense type and the Night Elf is of course sympathetic and nature-loving, moved by the plight of the animals in the area and pushing the Gilean to try to help them. You go through a small quest chain to help them both out, ending with saving some slyvern pups from a cave full of ice giants. When all's said and done both NPCs walk off bantering with one another, and one of them drops a line demonstrating that they're actually a couple. Easy to miss and non-essential to the story, but tastefully and organically done all the same. Actually recontextualizes a lot of their earlier quest text as playful ribbing with one another, as opposed to two opposite personalities being assigned to do a random job.

[Koollan]

Didn't you see the roundtables? They have a bunch of feminist dance graduates designing the game. This is what you get when you put ">muh diversity" before actual talent

Story's way better than when the sex-pests were in full charge. I'd rather chuds call the game woke than have a garbage story, thanks.

Regardless, I'm feeling very optimistic about the optics of the story. There's definitely some room to improve still but it's much, much better than the forced-down-your-throat nature of BfA and SL.

[Jindujun]

There's a good example in the Azure Span where you're helping two members of the Kirin Tor, both women (a Gilnean and Night Elf), with an issue concerning wildlife and arcane contamination due to malfunctioning ley lines and the like. The Gilnean is a by-the-book no-nonsense type and the Night Elf is of course sympathetic and nature-loving, moved by the plight of the animals in the area and pushing the Gilean to try to help them. You go through a small quest chain to help them both out, ending with saving some slyvern pups from a cave full of ice giants. When all's said and done both NPCs walk off bantering with one another, and one of them drops a line demonstrating that they're actually a couple. Easy to miss and non-essential to the story, but tastefully and organically done all the same. Actually recontextualizes a lot of their earlier quest text as playful ribbing with one another, as opposed to two opposite personalities being assigned to do a random job.

That sounds a whole lot better! Awesome!

[Le Conceptuel]

Easy to miss and non-essential to the story, but tastefully and organically done all the same. Actually recontextualizes a lot of their earlier quest text as playful ribbing with one another, as opposed to two opposite personalities being assigned to do a random job.

That's extraordinarily good execution. Why can't we get more of that instead of Golden's glurge-y shipping?

[Aucald]

That's extraordinarily good execution. Why can't we get more of that instead of Golden's glurge-y shipping?

Plays well off another quest chain in the Azure Span with two other individuals who are in a similar situation that seems like teeth-clenched teamwork between two very different people (a Mage and Paladin). Goes just about like you'd expect it to, with both individuals learning a bit about other perspectives until one of them makes a hard choice that leaves the other reeling and reevaluating how they do things. That quest has no implicit romance subplot, suggested or otherwise, but it definitely seems like many of the quests in the Azure Span zone deal with different kinds of relationships between different strata of people. A bunch of the tuskarr quests are like that, as well.

[Oneirophobia]

The people upset about the Titan thing while glossing over all prior Titan lore except Legion have been a highlight of 'tarded positions thus far.

We still don't really know if the Titans are the actual problem or if it's just the keepers. So far our direct interactions with the Titans (although fleeting) have been on the benevolent side, it's the keepers who have mean/evil streaks. For all we know, Odyn had become obsessive in his directive and essentially gone rogue. He did sort of steal half of Ulduar and fly away in a temper tantrum, abuse his "daughter" and make deals with Mueh'zala. I don't know if that is really "Titan approved" behavior, but I think we will like discover it would be. I imagine the direction we're headed in is "all of the cosmic forces are a-holes, they should be used as tools to enforce a mortal-born concept of balance and nothing further." Basically the plot of Diablo.

[Skytotem]

There's some nice moments in the expansion but the overall storytelling is even worse than Shadowlands for actual entertainment value, even if it is less damaging to the franchise.

Once I hit the Centaur area I wanted to skip absolutely every single line of dialogue. I hate these fucking people and do not care about their plight one iota, just let me swoop, slash and loot.

Didn't you see the roundtables? They have a bunch of feminist dance graduates designing the game. This is what you get when you put ">muh diversity" before actual talent

I think that's an uncharitable exaggeration, from you both what exactly is your beef with the story?

I don't like that they just retconned this prior generation of Centaur in, but the story they seem to be telling with them is fine in a vaccuum, the problem that the new team AND the old team has is that they don't bother to put in the work for consistency and don't recognize how to apply consequence or account for implications and effects from events in their work.

Like how Wrathion no longer has his BFA era maturity when dealing with Sabellian and acts like his Cata/MoP self again.

[Super Dickmann]

We still don't really know if the Titans are the actual problem or if it's just the keepers. So far our direct interactions with the Titans (although fleeting) have been on the benevolent side, it's the keepers who have mean/evil streaks. For all we know, Odyn had become obsessive in his directive and essentially gone rogue. He did sort of steal half of Ulduar and fly away in a temper tantrum, abuse his "daughter" and make deals with Mueh'zala. I don't know if that is really "Titan approved" behavior, but I think we will like discover it would be. I imagine the direction we're headed in is "all of the cosmic forces are a-holes, they should be used as tools to enforce a mortal-born concept of balance and nothing further." Basically the plot of Diablo.

I agree with the latter point, but I think the former isn't really a necessary position to take like you acknowledge at the end. The Titans being nice grandfatherly dudes was entirely a Legion invention, prior to that they were depicted as well-intentioned but on an extremely high level scale. People like Algalon were given the keys to civilization-ending machines they could use to kill everyone at present at will. Tyr and the other Keepers involved were conduits for the powers of the Titans and Aman'thul is explicitly given as the source for Nozdormu's visions, in what was essentially a scheme to outsource their powers and jobs to a native set of entities and, once they'd completed their purpose they'd be sterilized and lose said abilities to not be a further threat.

Putting chemicals in the water to nudge them in the right direction is hardly out of lockstep with people who originally wanted to populate the world with identical robots and isolating it to Odyn, while likely because I don't see him both appearing and not getting killed off to appease a certain subset of the audience, isn't correct. Odyn wasn't insane to take the route he did, his arguments about the dragons being unfit and blessing them being a mistake were proven correct when most of them went insane and Deathwing in particular was the centerpiece of the Old Gods' plan. Not that that counts since Odyn had also gone native and latched onto a random mortal race, him and Tyr were just using a different party and Tyr's water plan is significantly subtler than making a warrior cult based around how cool a guy you are.

@Skytotem

Much like the correction of the Titans away from Legion/Chronicle back to their older portrayal, the correction of Wrathion'd be good were it a thing, but I'm not convinced it really is. BFA itself was an answer to how Wrathion was inexplicably focused on the Legion instead of the actual major foe of his flight and had also done nothing but fuck up prior. The Old Gods were a more natural opponent to him, one he could get the subject matter of and would give him a win. Without it, he'd have nothing to point to at all to justify his candidacy in DF and he'd be a smarmy nuisance. There wasn't really anything there to test his maturity or responsibility, but a straight-forward conflict with ultimate evil. DF doesn't really change him so much as put him back entirely outside the context of his flight and realm of competence where he still has a lot to get a handle on.

[Biomega]

There's a good example in the Azure Span where you're helping two members of the Kirin Tor, both women (a Gilnean and Night Elf), with an issue concerning wildlife and arcane contamination due to malfunctioning ley lines and the like. The Gilnean is a by-the-book no-nonsense type and the Night Elf is of course sympathetic and nature-loving, moved by the plight of the animals in the area and pushing the Gilean to try to help them. You go through a small quest chain to help them both out, ending with saving some slyvern pups from a cave full of ice giants. When all's said and done both NPCs walk off bantering with one another, and one of them drops a line demonstrating that they're actually a couple. Easy to miss and non-essential to the story, but tastefully and organically done all the same. Actually recontextualizes a lot of their earlier quest text as playful ribbing with one another, as opposed to two opposite personalities being assigned to do a random job.

I'm happy to hear they actually have stories like that. That sounds exactly like how it SHOULD be done - natural, organic, matter-of-fact. Just a regular old quest where the fact that it turns out in the end they're a couple isn't relevant or signposted, it just IS. Hats off if that's really how it plays out (I'm not playing myself, but I take this description at face value).

WoW's quest design in general has had a bit of a cliché issue - everything is either over-the-top and cringe, or completely banal. It's rare these days to find engaging, interesting quest lines with coherence and substance. Why should I CARE about NPC X and Y doing something? How does it all make me engaged, rather than just playing the role of NPCs to a faceless degree? They've really had a hard time not veering into one extreme or the other, especially in SL. Didn't help that SL was effectively just Cliché Island, where each realm had "its thing" and everything you saw there was just "that thing" played out to some degree or another. Which made every quest either completely generic within its respective container, or a parody of some kind.

I really don't get why WoW isn't leaning more into involved, narratively complex questing. Does it really just have to be Collect 10 Bear Asses dressed to the appropriate expansion theme, over and over and over again?

[Skytotem]

I really don't get why WoW is leaning more into involved, narratively complex questing. Does it really just have to be Collect 10 Bear Asses dressed to the appropriate expansion theme, over and over and over again?

I feel like these two lines contradict each other?

[Aucald]

WoW's quest design in general has had a bit of a cliché issue - everything is either over-the-top and cringe, or completely banal. It's rare these days to find engaging, interesting quest lines with coherence and substance. Why should I CARE about NPC X and Y doing something? How does it all make me engaged, rather than just playing the role of NPCs to a faceless degree? They've really had a hard time not veering into one extreme or the other, especially in SL. Didn't help that SL was effectively just Cliché Island, where each realm had "its thing" and everything you saw there was just "that thing" played out to some degree or another. Which made every quest either completely generic within its respective container, or a parody of some kind.

I really don't get why WoW is leaning more into involved, narratively complex questing. Does it really just have to be Collect 10 Bear Asses dressed to the appropriate expansion theme, over and over and over again?

WoW has generally had quests that run the gamut from involved or narratively complex to ones that are just dressed-up fetch quests in which you collect X bear haunches or zebra hooves. This goes all the way back to Classic, although I'd say the ratio has gone from favoring fetch quests to at least trying to tie in the quests thematically to the zone's current goings-on a bit more. One thing I appreciate in more modern WoW is that NPC interactions tend to have a more organic feel - as opposed to the completely stationary NPCs of yore who do nothing but stand in one place and dole out fetch quests. There's more of a sense of interaction and involvement in a lot of the Dragonflight simple questing, with NPCs moving along with you or participating in the quest than just being fixed points. This was true in Shadowlands and even BfA as well, but they seem to have refined the technique a bit more.

This isn't to say some quests aren't still anvilicious or mind-croggling all the same, there's definitely still that. The Ohn'ahran Plains are kind of bad for it - lots of "hunting" style quests that, while a thematic fit for the zone and the Maruuk, are still kind of rote and boring. Leveling chores and nothing more.

[Mehrunes]

The "Sealed Evil in a Can" trope is pretty much endemic to fantasy, though I do agree it's an overused trope all the same.

It's not even about the (over)use or not to me, but whether someone bothers to explain it. The Old Gods for example do have an explanation in that the Titans tried killing one with their oversized hands and it fucked the planet up so they didn't want to risk it. Now, there is still a question of why they haven't tried a more surgical strike using the Titanforged, especially once they were captured, but with how valuable Azeroth was to them perhaps they were being overly cautious. And the Titanforged, being automatons following orders, didn't try it in the millennia afterwards on their own either.

But when the Incarnates have just the explanation of "but muh feels" from Alexstrasza, which apparently overruled all the other Aspects even though at least Neltharion and Malygos would have had no such qualms, that is pretty unsatisfying.

[Aucald]

But when the Incarnates have just the explanation of "but muh feels" from Alexstrasza, which apparently overruled all the other Aspects even though at least Neltharion and Malygos would have had no such qualms, that is pretty unsatisfying.

One of my hang-ups with the Incarnate storyline is that it seems to be rather inconsistent based on Alexstrasza's account vs. that dracthyr starting experience account. Per Alexstrasza, it seemed like the Incarnates were an "all hands on deck" problem, and that she was critical to their imprisonment as a kind of deciding vote, hoping for some kind of future reconciliation and/or rehabilitation for the Incarnates. In the dracthyr starting experience as related by the Nozodormu-centric cinematic shorts, it seemed like Neltharion was tackling the problem of the Incarnates on his own, more or less, finally calling upon the power of the Old Gods to seal away the Incarnates due to a lack of options otherwise after losing control of his dracthyr. The other Aspects, save Malygos, seem almost uninvolved in ultimately dealing with the Incarnates - with Malygos' aid really only being with helping seal away the dracthyr in stasis.

[Super Dickmann]

One of my hang-ups with the Incarnate storyline is that it seems to be rather inconsistent based on Alexstrasza's account vs. that dracthyr starting experience account. Per Alexstrasza, it seemed like the Incarnates were an "all hands on deck" problem, and that she was critical to their imprisonment as a kind of deciding vote, hoping for some kind of future reconciliation and/or rehabilitation for the Incarnates. In the dracthyr starting experience as related by the Nozodormu-centric cinematic shorts, it seemed like Neltharion was tackling the problem of the Incarnates on his own, more or less, finally calling upon the power of the Old Gods to seal away the Incarnates due to a lack of options otherwise after losing control of his dracthyr. The other Aspects, save Malygos, seem almost uninvolved in ultimately dealing with the Incarnates - with Malygos' aid really only being with helping seal away the dracthyr in stasis.

It could easily be both, really, with Raz as either the first or last one dealt with. The first would mean that Neltharion would pull back afterwards, Malygos likewise, to deal with the Dracthyr and the fallout and he'd be more withdrawn if what to do with them after the rest were caught ultimately came to a vote. If she was the last one dealt with, likewise - he already captured one and capture stands to reason. It's not like that Raz was sealed was hidden from the other Aspects, just the means of how it was done. It's described as a war after all, and it could easily have gone from a more local phase to a bigger one or vice versa.