Blizzard, owned by Activision, owned by Microsoft (Microblizzavision) announced the next expansion for World of Warcraft (WoW) about two weeks ago.
It piqued my curiosity…
See, I more or less gave up on WoW during “Battle for Azeroth” (BfA) as I mostly play for the setting, and the setting had ceased to be “Warcraft”. The current expansion, “Shadowlands”, is such a radical departure from the overall setting that even the company’s writers have no idea where to go with it. So it’s a mess of disparate systems with a janky storyline and a lot of pointless time sinks that only serve to annoy.
In short, WoW is a mess right now and has been for several years. And the abysmal user numbers these days prove this out.
So Blizzard went off to have a rethink apparently; they pulled people off of the current expansion (cancelling an entire content patch) and set about working on all of the broken stuff… And announced the end result two weeks ago.
“Dragonflight”
Dragonflight makes all of the right noises from Blizzard management; “going back to a grounded Warcraft setting”, “getting rid of borrowed power”, “more focus on core functionality instead of layers of systems”, and “putting the RPG back in MMORPG”.
Basically my laundry list of gripes were being addressed, so I re-upped for 6 months to signal my approval of the better direction and have been playing catch-up this week.
When I quit during BfA, I canceled my account completely, so I had to start up a new account and begin from the ground floor; level 1.
Last night I made it to 53 (out of 60) and have started on the Shadowlands content… Fortunately Shadowlands is 2-3 content patches along and most of the truly bad stuff has been edited out. So it’s still a weirdly disjointed story with too much emphasis on Mary Sue NPCs, but at least it’s not painful to level through.
Once I hit 60 I’ll attempt to meet up with a few friends who still play, and bum around the world doing things like unlocking mounts and looking for fancy armor bits until Dragonflight launches.
Given how expensive it is these days to leave the house, $12 a month for WoW, if it’s fun, seems like a good deal…
Listening to "Sailing" by Christopher Cross