It’s been over a year of Dragonflight now, and as we close in on the year 2024 and the pending release of The War Within, now feels like a good time to look back at Dragonflight’s first year and talk through it a bit.

I’m going to start with a post format I haven’t used in a while – I’m going to say something inflammatory and sort of ill-explained up top, and then I will wiggle my way through the post towards an explanation that makes sense of it. If you immediately disagree…please, hold your fire, let me cook for a minute.

So, here goes nothing – Dragonflight is Shadowlands v2.

Okay, let’s immediately cut the legs out of the initial reaction I would expect with a disclaimer – that is not inherently a bad thing. Shadowlands is an expansion that some people liked. Some people even liked it a lot! On a certain level, stripped of the worst bullshit it possessed, I liked it. My decision to leave WoW behind for the last year of Shadowlands was a composite decision of a lot of things – some related to the game and some not, and if any of the factors had been tweaked like 10% in a better direction, I probably would have stayed. The core gameplay loop of Shadowlands – dungeons and raids – were strong enough for me and I do have some fond memories, believe it or not, of Shadowlands. Sure, every patch overstayed its welcome by 3 months or so, and sure, Covenants never became the bastions of free choice and player expression Blizzard was convinced they’d be, but the core design of the reusable gameplay assets was solid. I liked the dungeons of Shadowlands mostly, I enjoyed the raids enough (I will contend that I liked Nathria a lot, disliked Sanctum of Domination, and never did a real current run of Sepulcher or the Fated raids outside of a brief round of LFR play), and the world of the Shadowlands had some neat ideas, even if Korthia was fucking depressing and the story direction was absolute trash tier. If those things get tweaked even just slightly, a couple of small systems removed, or if social scenarios had played out better – I’d have probably stuck with it.

Expansion quality is subjective, and I know that calling Dragonflight equivalent on some level to Shadowlands is going to make people bristle, but my argument here isn’t in terms of quality or reception – it is core content design.

What Makes WoW WoW?

World of Warcraft’s modern design paradigm hinges on the pursuit of player power as the primary motivator for what makes the game run. When a new expansion or patch launches, the chase is always for the shinies – higher item level, better-looking gear, and then content against which you can test your new toys. At almost every level of the modern game, this is the core loop – world content to Mythic raiding, everything has the same rough guidelines. The game’s audience at this point in time is primarily people who never do dungeons or raids outside of maybe some queued dungeons on Normal for a quest or a peek at LFR. That’s not a bad thing – but Blizzard has had to make shifts to address this audience.

In the past, pretty much since Mists of Pandaria, the answer to this conundrum has been to design new seasons of content (before we called them that) which had a new raid and PvP season for the players that gravitate to WoW for that stuff, and then containerize the new instanced content in a new world zone that would have story chapters to play, catchup gear to earn, and a myriad of puzzles, treasures, rare monsters, and doodads to find and explore for. This model has largely been the standard for WoW for over a decade now – from Mists of Pandaria’s earliest patches in 2013 through to Shadowlands. Blizzard has gotten adept at this approach and it has, generally speaking, worked for a large portion of the audience. However, there’s an interesting drawback to it.

WoW’s playerbase, by most available stats, is primarily not people who play dungeons or raids as a draw to the game. What they find in WoW is different and harder to quanitfy, but the model of world content that Blizzard has used for years now does a pretty good job of offering those players a good chunk of stuff to bite into. The problem comes in with the model as a whole – this world content is locked to and tied in with new dungeon and raid drops, and so world content was always gated to the release of this other content that a majority of the playerbase doesn’t meaningfully engage with. For those of us who do dungeons and raids, this is grand – at the point our push of progress slows down, we have this whole buffet of world content we can focus on with more intensity, but for the players who only touch the world content, well – you run out of stuff while waiting for the next thing. And you have to wait quite some time, because your content, inexplicably, doesn’t come out until the raid or dungeon stuff does. That’s why a lot of that audience goes back to legacy content to farm transmogs or other cosmetic rewards – because there’s just too long to spend waiting for the next thing that is made for you. While the progression gameplay audience is typically eating well with a strong mix of instanced content and world stuff they can go back for, the majority of the audience was stuck waiting.

So how do you solve that problem? Well, an obvious solution emerges – player power.

Borrowed power systems were aimed heavily at these players. Why? Well, an instanced content enjoyer might scoff and wonder that, but it makes a lot of sense – world content can be scaled more aggressively in a game where the average player is acquiring more power more regularly, and when you have granular, low-level control over that power gain as a development priority, you can fine-tune the world content to create a feeling of progression. Give them gear, give them small boosts of outside power, give them a high-power, big-scaling extra ability button that has flavor, story, and does big things, and well, now you’re cooking. By creating checkpoints where world content gets noticably easier, it becomes easy to keep some of the audience engaged for longer. Not everyone has the power fantasy or cares about kill times on world mobs, but having higher and more satisfying crits, attacking faster, feeling more tanky and strong – those things have very real multipliers on experience because the game feels better for them. And regardless of what internet asshole debate pedants with screeching voices and idiotic ideas might say, how something feels does, in fact, matter.

The problem with borrowed power systems in WoW is that the carrot on a stick only works if we know the carrot will be a satisfying meal and last us long enough to be worth the chase. Legion pulled the plug on that (remember how many content creators talked about how cool it would be if we could take our Artifacts into BfA, including myself? Yeah, uh…oof), and every expansion past that with borrowed power only further exacerbated it. You replaced Azerite armor regularly throughout BfA and had something to constantly farm on top of that, not to mention that it was immediately killed of usefulness in Shadowlands. Likewise, Covenant powers were neat enough as ideas, but the Covenant choice was never all that interesting (if you even knew the math, there was always a best one, and four choices does not a bounty of intrigue make), and the subsystems under the Covenants were genuinely the worst ideas Blizzard has ever had – constantly farming and replacing Conduits with new ranks, needing to maintain Renown to keep Soulbind choices unlocking and rolling, needing to run extra content (and then finally just enough content in 9.2) so that you could craft and recraft your Legendaries, with the added caveat that scaling and tuning both would wreak havoc on your choices and mean changing around the Legendary tier to tier, depending on class and spec.

No matter what easing measures Blizzard took over time, borrowed power always had problems. It was made to be a fun and flavorful expression of unique choices for the average player, but it was player power and that meant it was thoroughly min-maxed by instanced content enjoyers, whose data became the predominant means by which the average player would then make their choices, which would cause Blizzard to tune and retune, which would make the choice marginally more interesting while pissing everyone off, and then all this wasted energy is disposed of when the next expansion launches. Blizzard, coming into Dragonflight, made what I still believe was the right choice – they nixed borrowed power altogether. It just flat-out doesn’t exist anymore, in favor of gear as the primary and only real meaningful increase to player power. But that then leaves a question – what fills the void left by this choice for gameplay at that average level of play?

The Evolutions of Dragonflight

Dragonflight has been smart in some ways about how it has evolved the model of WoW. Firstly, Blizzard has smartly used minor patches to release more open world content between raid and dungeon seasons, giving the majority of the playerbase something new and interesting to play with as the current thing wears away. This new content has come with all the garnish of a normal new world content drop – new higher item level rewards, achievements, new zones and areas to explore or new tweaks to existing areas, and all the varying types of gameplay that Blizzard likes to capture with their non-instanced content. The second thing has been a refocusing of energy into creating sidequest content and substories you can play through that deliberately unlock at different points to the main story. When you start to wind down the 10.0 launch stories, here comes 10.0.7 with the Baine/Centaur story quests. When 10.1’s story winds down, here comes the Blue Dragonflight chain and the Eternus/Infinite Dragonflight slice of questing. As we all start to wear out the Emerald Dream’s core story, we’re going to have a Night Elf story and the Gilneas Reclamation stuff to do. These things often either come with new patches or are flat-out locked up until Blizzard wants them out, but that is a strategy that helps drive engagement. Cynically, sure, it also increases subscribed time for those world content enjoyers, especially if they know a morsel of new stuff is on the horizon, but Blizzard has also not been aggressive about marketing the non-patch additions. The Blue Dragonflight quest chain kinda just kicked on one week without warning or fanfare, and it was one of the better pieces of storytelling the game has done in a long time! Because of things like that, I genuinely believe Blizzard isn’t solely pacing these updates as a retention strategy – I think there’s a legit interest in player experience that is reflected in how much more often this type of content comes out and the amount of effort it receives in development.

Dragonflight has also given WoW it’s own version of login rewards, tied to completion of small challenges, via the Trader’s Post. When it launched almost a year ago, the Trader’s Post was a neat little feature that offered a rotation of existing cosmetic rewards and new items solely through gameplay, with flexibility in how you get the currency and a series of difficult choices to make about which rewards are worth the minor grind. As a feature, I think the Trading Post is one of the best things Blizzard has ever done in WoW, because they can recirculate rare rewards and create new and interesting rewards for minimal development effort. The cloaks with hoods are super cool and I’m sure the development time for that art was not super-intense, yet it has generated a series of rewards in different colors that they can pop in as low-cost TP rewards. Likewise, recoloring fan-favorite weapons and armor and releasing them via the TP is a show of goodwill, because Blizzard could have just sold it for real money instead. I am a bit disappointed to see Blizzard leveraging Trader’s Tender as this new bonus they can throw in to entice people to buy shop bundles for real money, especially since they immediately started having higher-priced items in the Post the first month you could get extra Tender outside the gameplay systems around it, but the overall direction still allows you to get most things via the TP solely through gameplay, and the rotation and freeze system means the system is not as FOMO-inducing as it could be – so while I do strongly dislike selling Tenders as a bonus you can buy for money in limited fashion, the system as a whole is still overall a really highly-rated net positive for the game in my eyes.

I think that Dragonflight’s expansions to content in minor patches comes with a really positive thing for the full audience of the game – mid-season catchup gear and resets. In the past, each season of WoW gameplay was an island unto itself, and each major patch would add catchup gear to bring you up to current season starting points, but then beyond that, you started the season grind from the floor no matter when you tuned back in to the game. In Dragonflight, each minor patch has brought some improved form of gear catchup that puts you at a higher relative starting point to the catchup the season launched with. Wanted to raid season 1? You could do Super-rares in the world for gear alongside the Primalist Storms, which offered gear that could skip the dungeon grind and push you straight into LFR, Mythic 0, or even early Normal raiding and M+ with the upgrade system. In 10.0.5, the Primalist Storms expanded slightly so now you have easier access to the currency and extra gear slots with higher base item level jewelry. Then in 10.0.7, that gear could be pushed to 385 easier than before and even 395 with new upgrade currency, which was also silently added to the original Storm events. The same thing has now happened with 10.1, where world drops were on the upgrade track and pushed you to LFR entry item levels, then you could slowly get gear equivalent to Normal raid, and then in 10.1.5 you had easier access to LFR-level gear which could be catalyzed into tier sets, and then 10.1.7 added Dreamsurges which further accelerated that gear curve, and even now in 10.2, those systems have been updated again so they drop gear that is valid for entering the current tier via LFR and can even be pushed to the peak of current-LFR item level! Getting into the game and having ways to quickly accrue power and the feeling that bestows – Blizzard has put a lot of focus here in Dragonflight and it has, to my eyes, paid off. Gear catchup is very nice for the world content scene and making the newest content feel more fun, but it also provides that constant encouragement and side-door of entry into dungeons and raiding – you can be raid-ready without touching a raid, including tier pieces, and if the option is appealing to you, that door opens pretty wide when you can kit out in 450 average item level before doing that content.

Dragonflight has also smartly made a lot of changes to class and spec design and Blizzard’s overall philosophy on changes mid-expansion. Not long ago, Blizzard told us flat-out they were not doing mid-expansion revamps because it was too complicated and threatened the game balance more than leaving the broken thing in the game did, albeit with tuning to numbers. In Dragonflight, there are now more specs that have been re-worked during the expansion than those that haven’t – frustratingly so, in some cases (thy name is Windwalker Monk). Not all of these reworks have been bangers, but they’ve all generally addressed baseline class and spec issues and hit the mark for improving underplayed specs or addressing things like talent selection diversity and build choices. While it has, to Blizzard’s original point, sometimes upended the competitive metagame (Augmentation Evokers and the whole god comp of Season 2’s late era say hello!), the overall changes have been helpful to address things that are not just balance, but stuff like gameplay feel, the logic of the kit, and approachability.

Lastly, I think that Dragonflight’s addition of what is now called Dynamic Flight is still an overall net benefit. At times, it is more clunky and worse than old school flight, but the sense of speed and gameplay is often engaging and I enjoy the way it feels to pull off fun flight stunts and sprint from spot to spot with way more speed. I think that Pathfinder to use old flight should be day one, and while The War Within is aiming a bit at this, I still would prefer consistently having the choice instead of needing to earn it, but I accept the tradeoff. With dynamic flight, new gameplay options are opened up like the races and the use of dragon mounts in PvP to dismount and engage aerially in ways that you couldn’t before, and I think that’s cool. The races, while I have stuck to the regular courses so far, are a fun addition to the world quest system and the ability to just log in and spend some time admiring the world while racing around it is neat. One thing I fear a bit is that TWW might scale back on races since there’s no longer the dragonriding construct around it and the overall darker tone of the expansion may not mesh with it as well – but at the same time, I think Blizzard always inserts levity into the gameplay and the race concept still works and could still absolutely exist in the new expansion.

So when I say Shadowlands V2, this is what I mean – these changes each represent an evolution of the formula, but they don’t fundamentally change the basics of what modern WoW is, what Shadowlands defined WoW as being when it launched back in 2020. That’s all gameplay perspective though – so what about the lore and story?

The Mess of Narrative

Dragonflight is Shadowlands V2 from a story perspective in that it uses and shares a lot of the same narrative delivery mechanisms. Mid-raid cutscenes, pre-rendered CG and machinima at key moments, talking-head dialogues during quests and gameplay/story moments. There are also things tucked into quest text and a lot of crucial story details packed away in a novel that released later into the expansion than usual, but it is still there and boy is the current lore somewhat baffling without that context in the game!

Dragonflight’s lore is the place where the game is most like Shadowlands at present – a confusing and muddled mess that doesn’t seem to know what message it wants to convey, where the overarching theme of adventure and exploration are undercut by the main story leaning into dark and threatening story hooks without taking a moment to reconcile the two ideas. It has generally done better than Shadowlands, if only by virtue of the fact that Shadowlands was an abysmal expansion for storytelling that knew even less about what it wanted to be and the mess of that situation was on constant display for all to see. The bar is subterranean, so clearing it is, generally speaking, pretty easy. Dragonflight has has some genuinely interesting moments where it threatens to be good – I liked the Baine story in 10.0.7 and the Blue Dragonflight quest chain a lot, and while I fear where the Eternus story will go over time, the initial hook of it is actually pretty sharp and well-done. The main story has also, admittedly, not been as offensively bad as Shadowlands, mainly because it has focused on additive bits of new lore to well-liked characters over vast rewrites that change the character of dozens of major lore hooks from the Warcraft III era. There are some characters whose lore has not done well for me this expansion (Wrathion feels bad and downgraded, Ebyssian feels like a totally different character that only loosely pays homage to the original Legion iteration, the whole Nozdormu/Murozond mess is so hastily written off in the megadungeon as to feel like whiplash) but the overall direction is not as immediately eye-rolling. What I think Dragonflight lacks is a unifying purpose, because each chapter of the lore has been a totally different and disconnected threat with no real central thread. The Incarnates, the closest we got to that thread, has been snipped and retied in the current patch in a way that feels like a rewrite, especially when paired with the late-release novel and how it changes the character of the Incarnates and the Aspects in ways that don’t quite mesh.

I think my other major issue is that where Shadowlands leaned on nonsense “rule of cool” moments to try and hook players, Dragonflight leans into “power of friendship” type stories in a similarly ham-fisted way. It also touches a lot on trauma, trauma bonding, and issues in that sort of vein, but the current narrative team at Blizzard doesn’t have the deft hand to get those narratives to land as well as they should. They’re not necessarily bad or tone-deaf in a really bad and unfortunate way, but it’s more that they’re a little basic and don’t quite reflect the full variety of lived experiences people with that kind of life experience would be looking for. Now, would I want to see what the current team would write on that deeper level? Eh, I dunno. On the one hand, I still don’t trust them like that, to do it the level of service I would hope for, but I think they also got so frustratingly close to making the basic version resonant and interesting that I am curious to see, good or bad, what would have happened if they pushed those storylines a little harder.

One major slip Dragonflight has revealed, albeit mostly outside the game and contained to PTR, is the disconnect of the central narrative teams and the quest design and gameplay teams, such that the gameplay team is given free reign to push their own stories without needing to ensure they fit the larger, overall continuity of the Warcraft setting. In the 10.1.5 PTR cycle, this was discovered due to the use of a particularly heinous plot hook with Alexstrasza and some trauma from her past, which made it to PTR in such an awful state that it was rightly disputed out of the game, never seeing the light of day on live servers. The lack of a mandated continuity check or any sort of rigor around ensuring that the quest designs fit with established lore is a saddening revelation, but also one that, unfortunately, explains so much about how the game often misses the mark on lore in the modern era. Outside of specific lore hooks and plot points, I think my biggest issue with WoW is the lack of structure and intent around meshing in-game storytelling with cinematics, narration, and external media. You could quibble in a lot of different directions about the relative quality of the story, and there’s room to agree and disagree, but I think coming at it from the angle of practicing the craft of writing, WoW is missing a core pillar of that craft by failing to ensure the lore remains a cohesive whole between all the varying forms of storytelling in the game and around it.

Lastly, one thing that I think actively still pisses me off about the story team at Blizzard is that in interviews and when discussing retcons and story changes, they insist on this cheeky, arms-length framing like “the appearance of retcons.” They make an effort to spin the continuity shortfalls of the game as a fun little quirk of the storytelling, something that is in-universe, but the problem with this is that the in-game lore isn’t really presented that way. Sure, Chronicle being unreliable narrator Voice of the Titans-style is neat, but when the in-game lore is inconsistent or changed from point to point, including events we see as players first-hand, it is frustrating as fuck. I read an interview in researching the in-depth lore piece I plan to follow this that actively pissed me off where one of the narrative designers was cheekily like, “is it a narrative error or an unreliable narrator” and it made me want to throw my PC through a window (and I live on a third story now, so that’s not a survivable drop). Like, you wrote the lore in a way that contradicts the earlier lore, you don’t get to spin it as unreliable narrator when you’re just an unreliable writer aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

Okay, deep breath in, we’re good now. Saving the breakdown for the big post about lore.

Dragonflight’s lore has been frustratingly close to breaking through a quality barrier at points, and I think that’s the thing that irks me the most about it. In average questing gameplay, it gets so agonizingly near to being something I can just unabashedly enjoy, and that almost makes me more angry. Shadowlands lore sucked a big fat egg, and that made the story funny and almost easier to enjoy on the level of laughing at the bad thing – it was The Room of WoW lore, so bad it was easier to enjoy everything else because of it. Dragonflight’s lore actually gets nearer to being actually good or at least serviceable, and I dislike that more because it means I care more and want it to break through that last 10-15% of quality to be a good story. It’s just like, goddamnit, you were so close to being a good story! There are genuinely good moments of storytelling and then we get poorly implemented ideas like the Emerald Dream finale, which is supposed to be a cool Avengers Assemble style moment but it makes little narrative sense and that kind of sucks the life out of it a little bit. I’ll save the rest for that big post and the details, but that’s my big takeaway – DF gets so near to being good that I find myself almost more disappointed that as a whole narrative it doesn’t quite break through that barrier.

The Formula Works (Maybe, Mostly)

So overall, I say Dragonflight is Shadowlands V2 because it inherits, for good or ill, the modern WoW formula. Cool zones, interesting zone stories and hooks, solid gameplay fundamentals in instanced content, and a world content formula that generally works with a limited shelf life, and then it shores that up with evolutions to formula through content release cadence, changing philosophy on catch-up and class/spec design reworks, and tops it off with a lore and storytelling approach that is frustratingly not evolved enough from Shadowlands. For a decent part of WoW’s audience, the formula is a success that keeps them playing, so hey – cool.

The problem is that Shadowlands also drove a ton of players away, where even the hardest WoW-riders I know cannot deny it – Dragonflight has not been met with the standard crowing of success about newest high-selling expansion because a lot of the players who built that streak are gone or checked out. When looking to players in this camp, I see a few points of feedback – Blizzard did not change the formula enough for Dragonflight, Blizzard wasn’t trusted to deliver meaningful change in the space of a single expansion, and the story being generally lower-quality overall remain sticking points that have not convinced players to return. You can argue that these are personal opinions, and that is true, but Blizzard themselves have not sent the message to those players to convey trustworthiness and it’s reasonable to expect that players will sit it out until the trend is established and trust rebuilt. On the gameplay front, that dam is breaking – I know a lot of folks who have sat outside of WoW since Shadowlands or even longer who are interested in The War Within for the gameplay it presented at Blizzcon 2023, and for my current in-game networks, people are excited for TWW in a way they weren’t for Dragonflight in the same announcement window.

On the story front…oh my. The game has a lot to do to re-earn trust there, and Dragonflight has, frankly, not been it. For me, gameplay focused as I am, I just don’t see the story getting much better and that is depressing. Further, seeing the way in which Blizzard retreats from criticism of the story and the lore team seems to have their fingers in their ears about any critique they get is disheartening. Sure, bringing back Metzen and specifically calling out the story as a point of improvement is a decent sign, but I need to see results before I praise it, and we’ll be waiting for the summer for the first fruits of that labor. One of the main points of that lore post I keep teasing here is that I fear Metzen is going to have a hard job to do – bridging himself back into something that he largely created but has been gone from for long enough that the character of it has changed. Writing your own setting and characters is hard, continuing that writing is hard, and picking it up again after entrusting it to someone else is very hard, because of all the issues with continuity that can creep up due to the changes made in his absence.

So overall, yes, I do think it is accurate to summarize Dragonflight as Shadowlands V2. It has made improvements to a core formula that did, despite controversy, work for a decent portion of the WoW audience, and some of the changes are substantial – but the character of the game, what remains with the tweaks and changes we have seen to date, is still recognizable as coming from that same lineage. In a lot of ways, this is both good and bad – the core formula of Shadowlands, stripped of borrowed power and artificial grinds, is a system that worked for a fair number of people, and while WoW struggled with audience retention in Shadowlands, they also didn’t suffer as large of a hit as would have been reasonable to expect. On the other hand, so much of WoW’s overall design still shepherds players towards gameplay modes that a large number of them don’t enjoy or want to partake in. Putting the major plot moments in the raids is a missed opportunity to make them available to the broader audience, and while the cinematics now can just be watched outside the raid when the LFR wing in question opens, that’s not exactly an engaging formula. So much of the gearing grind and systems around player power are explicitly intended to push players into raids and dungeons, and while I personally enjoy that content, I get that it’s not everyone’s thing and the game should offer some reasonable amount of ability to interact with content on their own terms, to test the limits of their gear and talents from outside of the instanced content setting. On the story front, while we’ve largely moved on to pretend that Shadowlands kinda didn’t happen (for now, except for the Ysera plot), there is a lot more that needs to be done to pull the game out of the murky waters of lore it is currently drowning in.

So in summary, I guess I am happy with the overall result, but I think for the game’s perception to the broad audience to improve, more change is needed and some specific areas of focus make themselves quite clear.