Dragonflight is perhaps the most ambitious WoW expansion in terms of content schedule and releases. We’re getting more regular content updates, some of which is by virtue of a very smart move – not holding everything behind the floodgates for a raid/dungeon patch. The game has, finally, acknowledged that not everyone or even a majority of WoW’s playerbase engages with dungeons and raids as their primary endgame content, and so instead of holding everything for a big super patch, we get the stuff that more players are interested in – new zones, new world content with daily/weekly/world quests – more regularly, and then the major patches are very similar in tone but have a larger new zone alongside a new content season, new raid, and the like.

There’s a problem with this model too, though – Blizzard has not updated how modern WoW moves through content.

Since Mists of Pandaria, WoW’s gameplay model has been possessed of a simple true north – the newest content is, generally speaking, the only stuff worth doing at the moment. This push moves a majority of the playerbase into the new zone and doing the new content together and makes finding groups and information about that content easier. However, it comes at a very real cost – WoW’s graveyard of legacy content is full of stuff that was fulfilling and interesting for a moment in time, and can be rewarding for armor appearances, mounts, pets, and such for a moment, but isn’t often worth going back for in a real sense. The cosmetic rewards are cool and are worth it for many, but the game makes it so that even just doing current-expansion patch content is an ordeal once it is past shelf-life, because rares are tuned to be non-soloable by a large number of classes and specs, world events that require multiple players will seldom be doable without making a big effort in group finder, and these zones feel lifeless as nobody is running around them.

In the past, while this was an issue, it was less of one, because content was out longer since it was held for major patch versions, often sitting in development for months longer than now because it was waiting for that raid patch, so players had a chance to get tired of the content and stretch their goals. Korthia was a dark spot of a zone, but it lasted for 9 months on live servers and so the wide array of different things you could do there could be done easily by the end of its useful lifecycle. Zereth Mortis was the main place to do anything in WoW for over 10 months! WoW’s history is littered with patch zones like these, but there are two, maybe 3 per expansion.

Dragonflight, already, has 3. The Primalist Tomorrow, Forbidden Reach, and Zaralek Caverns. It’s going to use the existing zones in Dreamsurges in 10.1.7, but those will also be eclipsed by what comes in 10.2, and then we’ll likely get some other form of micro-zone in 10.2.5 or 10.2.7, and the cycle will continue.

Why is this an issue? Simple – Blizzard has done a good thing in design in making more world content that is accessible to more players, but has not adjusted their model to make that content remain viable, and with more frequent drops of such content, we throw out the old stuff faster and faster.

Dragonflight’s launch was full of these cool little world events like the community feast, Siege on Dragonbane Keep, Shikaar hunts, and the like that encouraged players to hang out together in the world. This content was consistently full of players at launch, and it seemed like a cool twist on the WoW formula – you could still play largely solo, but these events let you exist solo in the world with other people around giving the game life. You didn’t have to party with them or join in any chats – you could just hang out and do your own thing, and everyone’s effort together made these events feel alive and fun. The siege was always done in minutes, the soup always legendary, and it felt really interesting and novel for World of Warcraft.

As the patch cycle was ready to move at launch, the question remained as to how viable those events would stay and for how long, and the answer is not very and not long. As soon as 10.0.7, they started to feel less necessary, and as of 10.1, it’s rare to see the soup hit high quality, the siege takes much longer, and the game encourages you to do these things far, far less. The world of the Dragon Isles is less alive, and because of how funneled the content is in 10.1, this is even happening in Zaralek Cavern, whose single world event is sparsely populated and whose hub city is rarely that full in my experience.

Don’t get me wrong, I really think that Dragonflight’s release cadence is fantastic and it feels like there is some lesson-learning being done, because not waiting for raid patches to release everything has made the game feel more alive and given players who aren’t in the PvP, dungeon, or raid grinds additional reasons to log in between patches, as well as keeping them generally better-engaged. But I think the game’s content model needs to better account for this, either by adjusting to have reasons to do the content still or by having it adjust to remain doable in small groups or even, eventually, solo.

Right now, the Forbidden Reach has a ton of rares that could pass some time or be fun to play, but their base health in 1v1 combat is too high when coupled with their damage output for non-tank specs or less-geared characters to solo. With the retirement of the Onyx Annulet as a viable endgame ring, there is little reason for well-geared players to do this content, and so the game just has this island full of stuff to do, introduced not even 6 months ago, that is just…dead. Fyrakk Assaults have the same vibe, as do elemental storms and the Primalist Tomorrow. Even Zaralek, the current patch zone, just doesn’t have that much reason for players to stay engaged, so they just aren’t. That’s tough!

What’s more, I think that Blizzard got away from what made the world events so interesting at Dragonflight’s launch – small, varied pieces of content where you could choose the level of engagement you wanted. Community Feast is mostly non-combat activity, and it’s fun to gather around the soup pot with strangers doing your assigned tasks, but nothing in the current event rotation for rewards has that same feel. Even combat-focused events like Siege of Dragonbane Keep and Shikaar Hunts have non-combat contribution options, and while the event as a whole remains focused on fighting stuff, you can still ride the train to event completion doing a lot of the non-combat stuff if you want to. Researchers Under Fire and Fyrakk Assaults are mostly combat-involved – Fyrakk gives no way to escape it, while Researchers has some moments of choice, but the majority of it is combat, and there are far fewer opportunities to participate without fighting, a place where the event feels weaker than Siege. Granted, if you’re playing WoW, pacifism isn’t really a choice you’re afforded, but I think that being given that in the Community Feast is part of why it stood out.

And through Aiding the Accord, the game often points to the newer activities over the older ones, which is understandable to a point, but it is also another way in which Blizzard pulls the spotlight away from the fun and still-useful parts of the game.

Taken as a whole, Dragonflight suffers more regularly from an issue that I’ve noted before in WoW expansions – the world and useful content library actually shrinks per patch, because the game is moving you to a carefully cultivated “current” experience by using the carrot on a stick of item level and content to push you in that way. Most of the Dragon Isles as a continent are dead content to level-capped players, most of the patch-added zones are dead content in the same way, Zaralek is alive but it already has problems holding interest for hunting rare spawns or doing the world content available, and as soon as 10.2 drops later in the fall, it’ll be dead in the same way. In the long-term, the outcome inverts, such that players doing Dragonflight as their leveling experience in 11.x will never need to even see patch content, rendering the Forbidden Reach, elemental storms, Primalist Tomorrow, Dreamsurges, Zaralek, whatever place we get with Amirdrassil in 10.2, and beyond all completely invisible to most players who run through after. Granted, it’s not exactly as though WoW has a massive onset of new players who will be running that stuff, but it exists as an issue in older content.

This is a larger issue I’ll be diving into more in a separate post, but consider this – the whole reason the Shadowlands-era new player experience was updated to BfA leveling was because BfA’s story dovetails into Shadowlands, right? Yet think about the leveling experience and content – how much of that is actually relevant to Shadowlands or the main, central WoW plot? Not a lot! WoW contains the major plot beats in the patch content so playing the leveling content is this fun breather from the main plot after whatever intro quests or scenario plays out, but you don’t really get the lore that continues on from leveling content. Nope, the BfA lore that is relevant to Shadowlands is all tucked into the patch content where you see Sylvanas alienate the Horde and push away, where she makes her pact with Azshara and you see Azshara pulled into the Old God storyline further for it – but none of that is even so much as hinted at in the leveling story! So WoW has this problem on both ends – the launch expansion content is rendered meaningless by patch content and zones, but then later, the new player experience puts players through the least lore-interested part of the experience for the sake of story, only to miss the actual details because they’re in the patch content that remains out of reach!

In 11.x, Dragonflight is supposed to become the new base leveling experience, and that’s neat to a point, but also, there is like 0 establishing lore there. Alexstraza fights an enemy that you’ll never see beaten because she’s in a raid, Wrathion and Sabellian argue over their ascent to Black Aspect but that whole story is rendered moot in 10.1 anyways (so you’ll never see it resolve AND the resolution does not match the buildup at all), and you get a lot of establishing lore about factions that are locked to the Dragon Isles and unlikely to continue the journey with us in the future. There’s hints at a story with the Infinite that isn’t resolved until a mega-dungeon, the actual meat of the Primalist story to date is all in either endgame or patch content, and the whole plot with Tyr exists outside of leveling and seems to be a lynchpin for content to come. That’s…not great!

In a lot of ways, there are lessons to be learned for WoW with content viability, because right now, it lets down on both sides – moving on quickly from the launch content when it is fun and could be maintained, moving new players through the lacking lore of the launch experience and hiding all the plot beats in the patch content most new players will never see unless they go back on their own and work through it.

The cadence of Dragonflight is great, but it also means we are discarding more content at a faster pace than ever before, and it doesn’t have to be that way, but until Blizzard updates the reward philosophy, well, here we are.