It’s been nearly a month since Part 2 of this journal. I bet you thought I’d given up on it, or given up on World Of Warcraft. I’ve come close a few times, but not yet. Having pre-paid for 3 months of time has done what I’d hoped it would do and kind of convinced me to keep going.
The reason I’m back writing is that finally, just in the past couple of days, I’ve really started to enjoy myself. My character is about level 50 now and around 23 hours old.
So in my last journal I talked about how WoW hadn’t really been grabbing me and as mentioned, that continued to be the case up until just recently. I think I’ve finally figured out why and it is partially self-inflicted by FOMO and partially just the way Dragonflight is structured. (Maybe all the expansions have been structured like this but Dragonflight is the first I’ve played (almost, so far) all the way through.)
So quick refresher, I started a new character, and did Exiles Reach to get to level 10. That was fine and fun and really short. Then I wound up in Stormwind and from there headed off to Dragon Land. The fact that I have no idea what the correct name of Dragon Land is, and that I can’t name a single zone there, is our first clue.
I first started playing Dragonflight the same way I used to play what we now call “Classic WoW.” I took every quest I saw and got ready to grind levels. But there are a LOT of quests and what I really wanted to be playing was The War Within which folk kept sharing stories about. I also heard from friends who’d hit level 70 in Dragonflight and then just got shunted over to The War Within against their will.
I figured if I was going to invest in Dragonflight I wanted to see all of it before level 70 happened so I stopped doing side quests and just did the main campaign quest. That started a whirlwind tour of Dragon Land. I moved through the various parts of the island so quickly that I had no sense of place and no connection to the land or the story. Once I got a flying mount, I just took to the skies and flew from quest giver to quest location, did some super trivial content, and flew back.
The story so far is…there are dragons and they come in various colors and some are good and others are bad and we’re helping the good dragons fight the bad ones. I’m not sure why the bad ones are bad exactly. There are 6 limbed dragons (4 legs, 2 arms) and 4 limbed dragons (4 legs, no arms.) I’m not sure why. And there are dragons that we just ride on and they seem to just be beasts? The 4 limbed intelligent dragons are only dragons sometimes, other times they take on the form of one of the WoW races though I’m not sure why. I guess to get arms? The main characters are… I have no idea. I can’t name a single one. There’s a queen and her I recognize because she is WoW-hot and then some dudes with multi-syllable names that go in and out of my head like the wind. Our goal is to awaken some stones which I think then awaken more dragons? I have no idea.
There is very little challenge to the gameplay and I’ve never had to grind at all, or do side missions to keep my level up. I guess they’ve moved all the challenges to the dungeons, which I haven’t done. New gear is granted from doing quests. I at first struggled with trying to put together some kind of “build” because there are a lot of talents to pick from, but then someone pointed out there’s a built-in build system you can follow so I’ve been letting the game tell me what to pick. There are random buffs that you get just from being in the zone to make things even easier.
So essentially for the first, I dunno, 30 levels of Dragonflight, it kind of all felt like an elaborate game of solitaire. Something kind of mindless to do to kill time.
Then finally things started to change. Right around the time you (finally) get to the Dragon home city (and can finally access your banks and optionally leave the Dragon Island to go do other things if you wished) I started having to do a few quests in the same region, which meant I was fighting the same kinds of enemies more than once and learning which ones did what and how best to combat them. And I was getting a sense of place. It still was damned easy but at least it felt a little like exploration.
Then that whole questline seemed to stop and I was shunted over to a time travel questline which I understand is eventually used to go back and play through earlier expansions. But THAT was fun and interesting. There were some boss fights, the story was neat, we visited different times in WoW history and learned some lore about the world. This section was over all too fast. I did learn that Chromie the Gnome is actually a dragon. Apparently they’re everywhere hiding in plain sight.
So that brings you up to speed. I’ve probably played more in the past 2-3 days that I have in the rest of the month since I was finally getting interested in the world. I think I’m almost done with the Dragonflight campaign and it looks like I’ll need to make up some levels somewhere before I can move on to The War Within. Presumably I can go back and do side quests or move back to the mainland. Whatever I do I’ll pick a spot and focus on it because my nature is more completionist than fast-tracker and being fast-tracked through this content hasn’t felt super fun.
Really looking forward to getting to The War Within and finally feeling like there’s no rush and I can just work on what I want, when I want. Hoping to get there soon.
Fascinated by my return to WoW? You may enjoy other parts of this series:
The “Back to WoW 2024 Journal” Part 1
The “Back to WoW 2024 Journal” Part 2
“Really looking forward to getting to The War Within and finally feeling like there’s no rush”
My friend, it’s EXACTLY the same as Dragonflight. When I landed in the second hub city in TWW and looked at the map and saw all of the “!” I had a panic attack because I was overwhelmed with how much stuff there was to do. So keep your blinders on when you make it to TWW or else you might experience the same.
I talked to a friend and he said he was just focusing on the campaign quest, and one benefit of the Warband system is that things like reputation and _quests_ carry over between characters, so if you do the campaign on your “main” character in TWW, then you can always come back with another character and do all the filler. Or just go back after with your main. I’m not a completionist, but I have to fight the urge to take every single quest I see even now.
I will probably do the same if/when I get to TWW but I won’t (I hope) have that low level anxiety about out-leveling it and getting booted off to the next patch or whatever. I dunno, maybe I’m just trying to talk myself into something here… 🙂
I don’t know… this just sounds like every fantasy mmorpg I’ve played in twenty years. I couldn’t tell you the plot or any of the names in most of them even the day after I did them. I’m constantly amazed by all the posts I read where people talk about plotlines and characters as if they can actually remember them. For me, they all blurred into one years ago.
I think that has a lot to do with why I find the writing in Wuthering Waves and other imports so much more involving and easier to remember. Stories about people having trouble getting funding for their lab projects or worrying about how their little sister is going to do at school when they’re away doing military service seem a lot more immediate than all this gods and monsters stuff.
I would agree that that’s every fantasy MMORPG in the last 20 years but I keep hearing about how good the stories are now. Though maybe they’re talking about TWW and not Dragonflight.
I still haven’t tried Wuthering Waves and still keep meaning to!