Has WoW gotten "too" family friendly?

[Najja]

...We have all these friendly dragons ... supposed to be awe inspiring, terror inducing entities ...

Look at season 2 of the new animated series Vox Machina ... that's how dragons are supposed to be...

...instead we have nice dragons in WoW who help us plant flowers and find new homes for frogs...

Have you paid attention to the game at all? The dragons are the titan forged protectors of Azeroth, why should they be trying to kill people and burn cities down?

As for being awe inspiring or terrifying.... really? Us player characters have murdered plenty of dragons, we've fought Demons, Titans, Old Gods and all manner of near deity enemies. Why would we be so scared of them?

And what should it matter of other franchises handle their dragons? They're not WoW so our dragons don't need to behave like that. Do you want them all to be the same regardless of what series they show up in? "Oh it's a dragon, must be evil cause ya know.... that's just what they are!"

[Zodiark]

Have you paid attention to the game at all? The dragons are the titan forged protectors of Azeroth, why should they be trying to kill people and burn cities down?

As for being awe inspiring or terrifying.... really? Us player characters have murdered plenty of dragons, we've fought Demons, Titans, Old Gods and all manner of near deity enemies. Why would we be so scared of them?

And what should it matter of other franchises handle their dragons? They're not WoW so our dragons don't need to behave like that. Do you want them all to be the same regardless of what series they show up in? "Oh it's a dragon, must be evil cause ya know.... that's just what they are!"

I understand all that. The lore or the game was manufactured to paint Dragons in that way. Nothing wrong with good dragons sprinkled in here and there. But there is now and I argue ALWAYS has been a lack of truly menacing villainous Dragons to be what they always were prior to modern games and cinema which was ANTAGONISTS! Part of a good story is good vs evil. Look at Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time (Novels), The Sword of Truth Series (up to book 4 Everything else just kind of went off on a tangent). Clear good Vs Evil depictions in these series I mentioned. Not all of them had Dragons of course but the Dragon mythos has been overused and abused by popular culture. It was a rare thing when a Dragon would appear in the myths and stories of old but whenver it did it was impactful.

Dragons when written that way can be a great antagonistic focus for any fantasy story. But when you make them "common" as well as remove their proverbial teeth and claws then it's like making Darth Vader a Limo Driver.

Going along with the original Lore in WoW back in vanilla when Dragons were hinted at having benevolent aspects who pulled the strings of good behind the scenes was an easier pill to swallow because they weren't so in your face. Things started to change during WoTLK with Dragonblight which contrary to popular opinion I didn't really enjoy all that much compared to how I imagined the experience would be. To me sometimes I felt that after Vanilla WoW became too much about a large pot of half cooked ideas that never really went anywhere and when they did it wasn't where you thought they would go.

Honestly I think that's how Dragons in WoW became what they are today. Several ideas thrown into a mix none of them fully complete and then random people through blizzard got their hands into the mix obfuscating things even further.

Regarding your last comment about Dragons being evil or bad because that's just what they are. Some things are just a certain way and that's it. If you run into a Crocodile they will pretty much universally want to eat you. Having outliers are fine but when you make them ALL nice and helpful then you create the same situation you are rallying against just in reverse.

[Goat7]

Neither of those are accurate...

100% accurate. just look up all the picture and videos on youtube or reddit and see for yourself

[Deventh]

We're nine expansions in. We've already had plenty of big, scary boss villain dragons. Black ones, blue ones, green ones, void ones, dead ones, a metal one so big we could only help by going around and killing tentacle parasites. Kinda gets old after a while.

Yeah, Disney will save the day!

[arkanon]

We're nine expansions in. We've already had plenty of big, scary boss villain dragons. Black ones, blue ones, green ones, void ones, dead ones, a metal one so big we could only help by going around and killing tentacle parasites. Kinda gets old after a while.

What really bugged me was his 'human form' was fantastic, I fail to see why that wasn't the final phase of the fight. I'm sure they could have easily come up with a logical lore reason he was forced into his visage / human form.

[unfilteredJW]

Dragonlance, the very much longrunning fantasy literature that many people have grown up with, have many friendly dragons. The dragons there are even aligned with either good or evil, depending on their colour. Metallic dragons are good, while chromatics are evil.

So..... you are wrong.

This poster coming in swinging with that Dragonlance lore.

This one gets it.

[Soon-TM]

This is one of the franchise's original sins, so to speak. Back in the day, and especially during WC3, Metzen spent a lot of time subverting many traditional fantasy cliches; Orcs could be brutish, granted, but they had a new "noble savage" sheen all over then. Elves weren't Tolkien's unabashed Mary Sues, but rather sexist, xenophobic and reactionary (nelfs), or even plain addicts, with an inflated ego and quite little to show for it (belfs). Humans leaders weren't all Aragorn's ripoffs, but instead could be quite nasty at times (Blackmoore, Garithos, Daelin Proudmoore), etc.

Thus, given that traditional dragons had always been baddies, Metzen decided to make them good bois (or gurls) instead. The problem, as they realised later, is that there was little room for friendly dragons in an MMORPG, so from the very beginning they had to create more and more contrived reasons to justify having bad dragons at all. "Corruption" was way overused, to the point of utterly ruining an end-of-expansion boss... Then they forgot about dragons for a while, but now we were bound to have the same good old pre-WoW, bland as !@#$ dragons.

[username993720]

Have you paid attention to the game at all? The dragons are the titan forged protectors of Azeroth, why should they be trying to kill people and burn cities down?

As for being awe inspiring or terrifying.... really? Us player characters have murdered plenty of dragons, we've fought Demons, Titans, Old Gods and all manner of near deity enemies. Why would we be so scared of them?

And what should it matter of other franchises handle their dragons? They're not WoW so our dragons don't need to behave like that. Do you want them all to be the same regardless of what series they show up in? "Oh it's a dragon, must be evil cause ya know.... that's just what they are!"

The Alliance should definitely be wary of them after what they've been through at the hands of Black and Red Dragons.
The Horde should embrace them as savage partners in arms.

[AudibleEscalation]

In Dragonflight. We have all these friendly dragons we deal with, a few who aren't so friendly but none that are truly terrifying.

I guess you haven't done Mythic Raszagath progg yet. It's anything but friendly.

[Soon-TM]

Has WoW gotten "too" family friendly?

The game has pandas as player characters. That ship sailed a long, long time ago.

While pandas and everything about them might look childish at first glance, Pandaria's story as a whole was some seriously dark !@#$. MoP was perhaps Warcraft at its best, with an uneasy but successful balance between grittiness and rainbows galore.

[Adamas102]

What really bugged me was his 'human form' was fantastic, I fail to see why that wasn't the final phase of the fight. I'm sure they could have easily come up with a logical lore reason he was forced into his visage / human form.

At least we got an exquisite costume to get some use out of that human form model!

[Stoneywon]

[QUOTE=Ladey Gags;54025577]Dragonflight is literally full of Pixar crap ripoffs. If you quested through this expac you can’t seriously tell me it wasn’t intentionally dumbed down to some dumbdumb friendly pile of happy rainbow sunshine friendship land. It’s nauseating, especially the voice acting. My god every time I fly over one of those Instagram river raft world quests and hear that blood elf talking about “fluffy animals” I lose 10 brain cells[/QUOT

So stop playing, you clearly do not like this expansion. I quit for 5-6 years and came back to find it a breath of fresh air and completely different then every other expansion. Sounds like you need to quit or find a new game.

[Shadowferal]

^ If enough people quit everyone will have to find a new game.

[Khaza-R]

I'll admit I redid the DF intro on a new alt and the dialogue is a little overly childish when I sat and paid attention to it. Same goes for pretty much every Dracthyr character you encounter.

[Powerogue]

We can only have so many expansions of ever greater HOOOORRIBLE COSMIC TIER THREATS trying to one up each other. This is supposed to be a healing period in Azeroth history. Life returning to the land and all that, so the overall tone is much more optimistic.

Writing off everything that's optimistic as "too childish" is really dumb, no wonder y'all so angry all the time.

I'm only one zone in so far but the old dwarf form dragon and the dragonmaw orc at the ruby pools got me feeling, so the writer's have still got it as far as I'm concerned.

[FelPlague]

No before WoW in any fantasy literature Dragons were bad asses. Not these nicey nice life giving good hearted creatures.

In your examples you literally bring up the Legends of Vox Machina, which is a D&D5e campaign converted into a TV show, which literally in D&D has good dragons, the mettalic, which are almost identical to the wow dragons we ally with. and the chromatics, which are the evil dragons you see in the show.

[druchii5]

For me at least, a large part of it (at least in Dragonflight) has been the voice acting and dialogue. I've been playing Warcraft since W3, and while it was never really a true "grimdark" game, many assets are becoming a bit too cheesy for my liking. Dragonflight has been solid overall but it's definitely not the same Warcraft from the past. It is what it is.

[dragi]

Well, in WoW dragons are more like a defenders of life. You can have different approach to subject.
But generally you have right, but in my opinion they somehow trying to cover their crimes in company with approach in games.
DF it's not RAW wild, rather like mentioned family friendly content. Next expansion we will not killing enemies only weakening them, and they will not dying only fainting

[Stickiler]

^ If enough people quit everyone will have to find a new game.

That is what is supposed to happen to games people don't enjoy. If you don't enjoy a game, stop playing, that's the _only_ way to illustrate that a game isn't fun to you anymore. And if too many people quit, it obviously isn't a very good game.

[HansOlo]

In Dragonflight. We have all these friendly dragons we deal with, a few who aren't so friendly but none that are truly terrifying. Dragons are supposed to be awe inspiring, terror inducing entities that radiate power, not your next taxi upon a quest-leg.

Look at movies like Dragonslayer from the 80's where it actually felt like Vermithrax (the name of the dragon antagonist), was something to be feared. When his anger was incited he bathed the countryside in blood and fire.

(Spoilers)

Look at season 2 of the new animated series Vox Machina in the first episode I was like now that's how dragons are supposed to be, as I watched a maruding band of 4 chromatic dragons obliterate the capital city.

All the while not sounding ANYTHING like the disney-fied dragons in WoW "Your monuments shall fall! Your civilization erased! Here me insects! You live out of mercy! Fight or flee and you forfeit that mercy!" All the while each dragon launched it's personal devestation upon the city and it's people.

One Dragon literally breathed gouts of poisons gas melting some from the inside. Yet another belched acid breath literally melting the castle ramparts. The frost dragon launched volleys of tremendous ice shards ripping apart the countryside. The leader's flame breath put Deathwing to shame. his fire basically turned into a giant molten beam of destruction vaporizing the main castle to it's foundation.

If anything close to this happened in WoW I honestly wouldn't know what to do. But instead we have nice dragons in WoW who help us plant flowers and find new homes for frogs...

You might not belong to the segment - have you considered that?

The playerbase is not the same gore oriented people 18 years ago. Today, the gamers plays LoL, Fort or whatever cartonish game.
Blizzard is targeting this group of younger people(as they should - otherwise, there won't be any games - if you target 30+ y/o busy/flakey people).