WoW demon Cortyn has played all the quests that exist in Dragonflight and draws a conclusion. What is the story of the expansion? Is it worth?
World of Warcraft Dragonflight has been playable for almost two weeks and, as is my tradition, I locked myself in my room for a few days and played through all the quests.
But how good is the story of Dragonflight? How interesting is the story? Are the side quests worth it or are they just boring standard fare?
Anyone who knows me already knows that stories and quests are always particularly important to me. While I’m definitely someone who “levels up fast”, I read every quest text, click through the monologues of the NPCs in the area and look at every dialogue. I just like the world and want to know what the developers have come up with.
Therefore, it was also clear to me that absolutely every side quest had to be played through until I could finally call the achievement “Master of the Lore of the Dragon Islands” my own and thus really experience all the relevant story content.
The Main Story: Short but spot on
The main campaign of Dragonflight, if you really omit all side quests completely, lasts between 5 and 7 hours on average and is therefore quite solid. In contrast to Shadowlands, the characters here are convincing across the board. I especially remember the adversary Raszageth well, but the rivalry between Furorion and Sabellian and the individual aspects of the dragons have also been given a lot of space.
Blizzard has taken enough time to fill the previously rather poor story of the dragons with significantly more content, to close some gaps in knowledge and to make each of the characters interesting without exception.
I would especially like to praise the enemies again, namely Raszageth and the primalists. Blizzard has managed to portray them not as “the next crazy cult” – but as rebels with a cause that, from their point of view, is absolutely understandable. Without wanting to spoil too much here, I can only recommend that everyone read the story texts carefully and also pay attention to the voice lines of the characters. As a rule, these are not crazy crackpots, but often comprehensible people.
I’ve caught myself more than once wondering: are we really on the side of the “good guys” here? Are the primalists really the bad guys? Or aren’t the titans even the bad guys?
The story of Dragonflight is again full of shades of grey, even if they are subtle and you just have to think a little longer about some things.
The only criticism I have here: The amount of “real” cutscenes seems to have decreased. There are often “in-game” sequences, but the elaborate, high-quality cutscenes were rarer.
But in summary, the main story of Dragonflight is interesting, understandable and never boring.
The much bigger topic of Dragonflight, however, are the side quests – and I’ll get to them now.
Side quests without end – each one is at least “good”
The much more important aspect of Dragonflight, however, is the overwhelming number of side missions to be mastered in each area. A whopping 34 side quest lines are recorded by the achievements alone and they often consist of 6-10 quests, in some cases a little less, in others a little more.
It is particularly noticeable that Blizzard has significantly upgraded the otherwise annoying “Kill X of it” or “Collect Y of it” missions. At the beginning or end of the quest, there is almost always small dialogue between the acting NPCs and some “mini-events” in which either the items you have collected are interacted with or the next phase of the quest is initiated. It’s often just small sequences, but they make it feel like more than just “turn in the quest and move on.”
I really liked, especially with the side quests, that Blizzard worked out the gray tones of the enemies well.
In one quest we have to take care of a number of baby dragons hiding from the attack of “Shardflame” – this is the renegade Dracthyr faction, which is a big antagonist in Dragonflight. In search of magical artefacts, a member of the Shard Flame then storms this daycare and is clearly overwhelmed with the situation. He can’t bring himself to hurt the little dragons and after a few quests he even decides to make sure the little ones don’t get hurt in this conflict.
A theme that struck me particularly strongly in all of the quests in Dragonflight is love – in all its possible facets. Whether it’s the romantic love of a couple, the friendship of a true bromance, or the familial love of a mother for her children.
Yes, this topic also includes the fact that Blizzard with Dragonflight has a significantly higher representation of homosexual couples or has also established that love exists across national borders in Azeroth. For example, you will find a centaur hunter trying to hook up with a dryad (who is really into it) or you will find out on the sidelines of a quest line that two researching Kirin Tor – night elf and human woman – are much more than just work colleagues.
Everyone has to decide for themselves whether they find it cheesy or annoying. I found it all very coherent and coherent. It made the world more alive and was usually just built into the quest’s “primary story”. It makes the characters more understandable, tangible and multi-layered. Some criticized this as “fake” or “annoying” – I found it mostly cute, but always appropriate.
Extremely many quests have remained in positive memory … actually all of them
In the case of the side quests, however, you’re not looking for a piece of gold, each and every one of them is interesting if you’re interested in the game world. The “World Building” that is operated here is really great.
So there was a blood elf who was thrown together with a human mage in the dragon scale expedition and actually doesn’t feel like it at all. Humans, on the other hand, are completely over-motivated and want to explore many mysteries. In the course of the quest line, the two thaw out a bit, have funny dialogues and are even comrades in the end – until the blood elf sacrifices himself to save the human, because he “is the future of the expedition”. The quest suddenly took on such a dark twist that it really hit my mood. And with characters I didn’t even know an hour before.
Elsewhere is a small group of black dragons, somehow mentally stuck in the past, waiting for Deathwing the Destroyer to finally emerge from the maelstrom and set the world ablaze. It hurt a bit breaking the heart of the over-motivated little dragon and teaching him that Deathwing was already there and lost. I won’t forget the tear-filled googly eyes in a hurry.
The humor is also great, or at least it met my taste. So you should bring food to a hunter, who of course tells you directly that he has problems with the bears nearby. We roll our eyes inwardly and think to ourselves: Yes, then we’ll have to hunt them down for the hunter. But nothing there, he says coldly: “What? Do I want you to hunt them for me? Do I really look that incompetent? No, I’ll do that alone.”
There is a quest line near the capital Valdrakken that revolves around a health resort (spa). A queue has formed there and, in the best “Karen” manner, there is an elf who “very urgently wants to speak to the manager”.
I could go on for many pages because actually every side quest is newsworthy. Each one of them is either entertaining, profound, funny or sad – often several things at the same time. You can tell from every single quest that story writers put their hearts and souls into their work and had a lot of love for Azeroth. Nothing seemed like “standard fare”.
If Dragonflight’s side quests are the new “standard fare,” then we, as WoW fans, have very, very rosy times ahead of us. Because I want more of it. Much more.
It’s been a long time since the game world felt so coherent, so much like World of Warcraft and at the same time so modern.
I would even go so far as to say that quest-wise, Dragonflight is near perfect. I don’t see what else could be improved here. Every single story was one worth reading. And only a few MMORPGs and also a few WoW extensions can claim that.
How did you like the quests of Dragonflight? Did you read them carefully? Or did you just “skip through” quickly? Which one do you have in good memory?