Exploring Ohn’ahran Plains

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It is quickly becoming a regular thing for me to log into Dragonflight Alpha on Tuesday nights and play the brand new build. You can read the full patch notes here, but this week’s test focuses on the Dracthyr Starter zone and Ohn’ahran Plains. Since I have already played my way through the Dracthyr “all casters all the time” zone twice now… It was onwards to Ohn’ahran Plains for me! Unfortunately, I could not take either of my already level 62 characters into the zone and instead had to create a brand new character and then let the NPC level me and transport me to the appropriate zone. Since I played through as a human I figured I would rock out on my normal Orc Femme Horde Warrior.

The zone itself is very Nagrand adjacent with flourishes of the Draenor version of Shadowmoon Valley. Wild and gorgeous and has some really interesting elements thrown through it. I got to experience the ducks for the first time, and thankfully the quest did not involve me killing them… but instead yanking tail feathers out of them which causes them to run away. This zone also has some of the coolest-looking bears that I think every hunter will probably rush out to go tame as soon as possible.

The best feature however is the phenomenal work that has been done with the zone’s skybox. This is legitimately one of the most painterly zones I have played through since maybe Grizzly Hills? There is nothing about the zone that reminds me of Northrend however and it is basically a blending of some of the better elements from Draenor. Again everything feels a little spartan for my tastes, however, I am greatly missing all of the micro objectives that we had in Legion. I am hoping that we are just seeing an early version of the zone that has yet to be populated with those things. I would really hate to have this expansion be absent of all of the interesting world objectives from the last several expansions. For me, at least those greatly improved the exploration aspect of those zones because I was constantly on the lookout for things to interact with. Once again the named gold and silver elites seem not to have drop tables yet, which I hope is remedied before launch.

We got yet another update to the UI, and while there are some massive LUA errors happening at the moment that require the use of “/console scriptErrors 0” to hide, it seems to be coming along nicely. This time around we were able to move our minimap. I hope that over time each of the different UI elements maybe gets a few more options, like the ability to detach the world buffs window from the map and move it around freely. the only negative is that the UI changes were different enough this time that it wiped my saved UI preset from before. It took me a few minutes to juggle things around back into the orientation I prefer. Legitimately we are on the trail of me not needing to run addons anymore. Again it could use a few more features… but it is getting there and I give massive credit to the team working on this.

The central story of the zone centers around the Centaur packs, but unlike Desolace… they actually seem to be genuinely good people. Like in the previous “friendly Centaurs” scenario… they only really liked us because we were actively killing their enemies. The version we get in Dragonflight is much more akin to the story of the various Highmountain Tauren Tribes from Legion. I did not get anywhere near finished with the story, but so far I am enjoying it greatly. Kudos to the folks who worked on the new models because they are pretty phenomenal. I realize it would be way too much to ask to get them as a playable race… but I am going to ask it anyway. They really are extremely cool, and there is even some subtle variation in the way each of the clans looks.
I’ve said it before… but there is potential greatness in Dragonflight. So far I’ve adventures in four zones, and while they are all in a rough state… the only one that I did not really enjoy was the Dracthyr starter area. The other three I would put up against some of the better World of Warcraft zones from history. It is going to be interesting to see how relevant these zones remain once you reach the new level cap. There is not a single one that I would mind spending more time in, and the design of each feels sufficiently unique while at the same time retaining a sort of general visual language for the Dragon Isles as a whole.

I feel like I am beating a dead horse at this point… but my only concern right now is the fact that we have less than four months left in 2022. If this is going to meet a release date in December of this year, then it will need a lot more work. I am concerned that the zones that feel relatively bare-bones currently… will remain feeling that way at launch. The look, feel, and quest structure is great… but it is missing the little details that made Legion questing feel so freaking good. I hope that given time these details can be added to really flesh things out. If they can’t… then I legitimately hope this release date gets bounced into 2023 because it might need it. I hate to think about the level of crunch that would be required to reasonably get this out the door before the end of the year.