World of Warcraft: Dragonflight – Review

It has been slightly over two years since we discussed World of Warcraft’s last expansion, Shadowlands, which we quite enjoyed. Nonetheless, the previous expansion felt like it was more of the same, and outside of the Covenant system, it felt like a meaty serving of extra content. Now, however, it seems the Warcraft universe is receiving its most exciting update in recent years, as you’ll be able to explore a completely new continent with a Dragonoid race, the dracthyr. With the ability to ride high-speed dragons, we were quite curious to see if Blizzard still has a few tricks up their sleeves.

Story

As always, the lore and story value are quite high when it comes to new World of Warcraft expansions. This time, you’ll get quite a bit of content to explore again, but of course, you can just power through what the game has to offer if you’d rather focus on grinding and going through dungeons. In this case, a new continent appears out of the blue that hosts a race of dragon-like beings. These so-called dracthyr have been slumbering for roughly 10 000 years after Neltharion decided the dracthyr were too hard to control. Sadly, the dracthyr will not be able to gradually explore their surroundings as the menacing Proto-dragons are now threatening the reign of the Dragon Aspects. The story is presented via many cutscenes and a lot of quest dialogue. Those who love the World of Warcraft lore will certainly get a kick out of the content that’s on offer here.

Graphics

Dragonflight is a very pretty expansion with an entirely new continent to explore. This continent is divided into different segments with a variety of environments. You may find yourself soaring through the jungle at one point to find yourself in an icy landscape the next. Once again, the game got a small graphical upgrade, making the game a bit more modern, a bit more polished, and a bit more impressive again. On top of the new environments, there are also quite a few customization options for the dracthyr, which is the new race this expansion is all about. All in all, we enjoyed exploring what this expansion had to offer.

A fun touch is also that the game now has a fully customizable UI. This means that players can finally get rid of a lot of add-ons, which is a huge plus.

Sound

The already iconic World of Warcraft soundtrack has been updated with a few new cinematic tracks to spice things up. Each of the areas has its own background music, which makes sure that exploring remains interesting, without having to worry about looping music too much. Ironically enough, the newly added tracks did remind us a bit of the How to Tame Your Dragon franchise. The game also boasts an impressive cast of voice actors, as once again cinematics and major quests tend to be voiced.

Gameplay

If you have stuck with World of Warcraft’s ever-expanding world, you’ll probably already know what to expect from this legendary MMO game. If not, you’ll be thrown into a massive world to explore, in which you can create a character of your choice, from a race of your choosing, with a class to further customize your character. You’ll also have to consider under which banner you wish to fight, as the world is still divided into the Alliance and Horde factions. The newly added dracthyr can be either Horde or Alliance, but at this point in time, they only have one available class to choose from: the Evoker. The Evoker can either be a healer or a DPS-based class, with the latter being the main option when playing solo. The healer will probably be your preferred choice when playing with other people.

Of course, the main attraction of this new expansion is the fact that you can play as a dracthyr, and as a result, soar through the sky. This soar ability is rather limited, however, and you’ll soon find out that riding a high-speed dragon will be your go-to for this expansion. The flight speed has been upped to 830% of normal walking speed, but you’ll have to fly manually, so you cannot just press a button and expect things to go your way. Building up speed is also done quite logically, where you must first gain altitude, and then dive down to actually go faster. When doing this, you can maintain your speed, as long as your keep going down slightly. You will not start out with this 830% speed increase, as you’ll need to collect glyphs by flying through them, and these are placed in very hard-to-reach places and awkward positions. This does add a bit of frustration to the mix, but once you unlock your speed increase bonuses, it feels extremely satisfying. Unlocking this speed increase on your main character will also unlock it on all your other characters, which is a great decision by Blizzard. Completing World Quests with your main character also rewards your other characters with the progress you make with your main character. However, reputation grinds are still done individually per character

Conclusion

World of Warcraft: Dragonflight is a fun expansion and its main shtick proves to be very original and enjoyable. While the game still holds on to what made WoW great in the first place, the added continent is a lot of fun to explore, and the fact that your secondary characters also get rewarded with the stuff you unlock with your main characters is a huge improvement in player comfort. This means that you won’t have to grind away with your other characters, and it makes sure that a lot more people can enjoy the game, even if they don’t always have hours upon hours of time. As a whole, we quite enjoyed this new meaty upgrade for World of Warcraft.

Ibuki

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Aspiring ninja.

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