Last night I took a break from my Path of Exile Inquisitor shenanigans and played around in Dragonflight Alpha for most of the evening. Up until this point, the testing had been entirely focused on the Dracthyr and their starting area. As I had said before neither the Dracthyr themselves nor the Evoker class was really my jam and nothing that I could see myself playing seriously. I generally crave playing melee classes, and unless I am doing that… it doesn’t really feel like “WoW” to me. So starting yesterday the Alpha testers had access to a new zone and all of the other classes to test it with. So as a result I took my Death Knight that I created last week to play with the talents and ventured forth into The Waking Shores.
The Waking Shores is pretty large. If I had to give an example of scale I would say something in the range of Draenor’s version of Nagrand. The scale of the zone also feels very large and epic, in part because so much of the architecture was designed for dragons. With the introduction of Dragon Flying as a mechanic, it also has way more verticality than I am used to. The only weird thing I have noticed is that the world feels really spartan. Starting with the Timeless Isle, I am used to WoW maps being populated with a staggering amount of little detail to be discovered in the forms of what I am going to refer to as micro-objectives. There were mini-bosses to kill and chests to loot for interesting baubles, collectibles, and gear. This seems to largely be missing from the design of Dragonflight, or at the very least there has not been a pass of development to populate these doodads and widgets.
The world feels way more “Alpha” than I have come to expect from a Blizzard game some five months from release. I’ve been in a number of alpha testing processes for World of Warcraft and just as an example at this point in Warlords of Draenor all of the classes were effectively complete, and the zones felt more or less “finished”. We still have a number of classes without new Talent trees for example, so I have not been able to check out the Warrior and am leaning back on my Death Knight as a result. Granted if the entire studio does a full-court press, they can get this game across the finished line, but it does feel like it is going to be way more tentative than I am used to. I do wonder if we are going to see an impending delay of Dragonflight into 2024. That would honestly probably not be a bad thing given that I am not sure anyone actually expected this game to be released in 2023 prior to the announcement of the release date.
With this update saw another release of the new UI. This time added to the interface are the player and target frames and some additional options for the existing hotbars. I really like that we can turn on a visible grid while editing the UI. I am hoping that means at some point in the near future we will be able to turn on snapping to the grid. It is amazing how much of a difference having these few additions improve the experience. I’ve said it before but if the WoW UI can get to a point where it is at least as detailed as the FFXIV UI, then it is highly unlikely I will install addons in the future. For me the key things I need are the ability to move my player frame and target frame to the center of the screen, and also have hotbars that are slightly below them. Then finally the main addon that I installed every time was one that unified all of my bags into a single pane… all of which are features now of the default UI. Massive kudos to the team working on this.
There is still quite a bit of placeholder text, for example, I ran a quest and the two NPCs were named Left and Right, and were on the left side and right side of an objective. I laughed entirely too much from this giant dialog of menu options as to WHY we are visiting the Dragon Isles. I specifically like “You tell me. I don’t read quests. I just complete them!” because it clearly sounds like a quest developer taking out some frustrations. I really have not spent enough time with the content to get a feel as to how it stacks up against other expansions. So far it very much feels like a WoW Expansion, and honestly feels a bit more like something like Northrend than it does like one of the more modern expansions like Legion. I am not sure if this was the intent, but I do miss a lot of the small zone details that were added starting with Pandaria. Again I am not sure if this is just a case of it being “very alpha” and not finished, or if this is more of a minimalistic design decision.
Right now we are level capped at 62 and I will probably finish out the zone on the Death Knight and then maybe start it again on Paladin so I can test out Protection talents. All in all, it does not feel bad and I am interested to see how this evolves.