Fans saw Blizzard Entertainment retcon years and years of lore with the introduction of the Jailer, Sylvanas Windrunner, a “morally gray” character who then became just plain evil. And while Dragonflight had simply been bland, fans are fed up after seeing the Dragonflight finale cinematic.
On Nov. 15, one of the best guilds in the history of WoW, Echo, cleared the Amirdrassil, Dream’s Hope raid on Normal and fans finally got to see the Dragonflight finale cinematic. The community, myself included, expected the expansion to end with a bang, seeing Fyrakk‘s death cutscene and a satisfying conclusion. But all the fanbase got is a conclusion that it was the friends we made along the way, and Reddit users couldn’t contain themselves from mercilessly criticizing Blizzard writers and asking for their replacement in the upcoming expansion, The War Within.
“I’ve enjoyed this expansion for the most part but that is an extremely underwhelming cinematic,” Lord_Nihilum commented.
Without going into too much detail and spoiling the story for you, I can just say that the cinematic felt fully out of place, did not fit into WoW as a game, and didn’t provide a proper conclusion to the entire expansion. Instead, it felt as if the Dragon Aspects didn’t actually need our help at all and could have solved this problem entirely on their own with their power of friendship, just like Care Bears.
“It’s like they wrote a single generic speech about friendship then split it up between every character just to give them each a thing to say. Why even have multiple characters in a scene if they’re all gonna have the exact same personality and perspective,” DukeOfBees added.
But this isn’t the end of this ballad. The power of friendship has now become a meme on WoW’s subreddit. And I wish I was done, but still, there’s more. WoW player greendino71 has put together an elaborate post, explaining why Blizzard should overhaul its writing staff going into The War Within.
Essentially, the post is nailing down all major plot issues Dragonflight has had, even with such a simple storyline. For example, Sarkareth was far from an exciting boss at the end of the Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible and wasn’t properly built up. Iridikron always seemed as if he would be the final boss and not Fyrakk. Finally, the overall writing tone felt as if it “was written by a middle school kid,” since the final cinematic boils down to the power of friendship.
Essentially, Dragonflight had pretty simple lore—The Primal Incarnates were the big baddies, and we had to defeat them, but this was expanded with Infinite Dragonflight lore and Iridikron. Iridikron completely fell out of the picture, and Fyrakk took over as the big villain out of the blue. The lore was simple, yet it didn’t follow a simple formula, and the peak of the story was the friends we made along the way.
