World of Warcraft: Current Year

Played most of the day without any issues. I was expecting launch to be a mess because it always is, but outside of the boat going afk, I only had one random dc that didn't seem to be caused by anything.

I don't know what they did, but after taking the portal at the docks, me and my friend only rarely ever saw anyone. I'm guessing the servers were just heavily instanced, which was nice because I think there was only once where one or two people were on their proto drake's sitting on the quest turn-in as well as being plenty of gathering resources around.

Like I said, I only dc'd once randomly but my friend dc'd probably 30% of the time after landing on her drake. She was back in real quick though so outside of being frustrating it didn't really slow us down at all

Made it to level 70, finished the story and completed most of what I wanted to do on day 1. I went into this one without completely blind (did not play beta, did not look anything up and apart from logging in a day or two beforehand to spend talent points and fix the UI a bit, it was a fresh run).

The good:

- No borrowed powered. Thank fucking God. It's about time they realize how fucking dumb their systems were.
- The dragon flight is actually pretty fun. I was surprised by this.
- The MSQ was actually a lot better than the shit that was BFA/SL. I found myself not skipping every cutscene, which I assign to the fact that there was no Sylvanas.
- The talent system being back is a huge plus.

The bad:

- There were way too many side quests.
- A lot of the side quests were absolute trash tier. Where before the side stuff was top quality, it's now become cringe.

Overall, it's better than SL/BFA. It's nowhere close to a home run though and won't last me very long.

They instanced the crap outta the campaign and that, honestly, is for the best. You do get to see a person here and there but most of the content is built assuming yer a solo player and in that sense having other people around is just fucking annoying as you compete for resources. Finished the first zone and dinged 65 so its seems likely that doing side-quests is completely optional and those who do them are just gonna be 70 way before the end of the solo campaign.

The writing has, surprisingly, not been too bad. Things like the black dragonflight drama are played up for humor and I thoroughly enjoyed Alexstraza's whole I-am-not-getting-involved-with-those-dipshits attitude. The whole 'new land' is also kinda fun in a very Mist of Pandaria way as it scratches that exploration and wonder itch. I've yet to see if they are gonna go all 'colonizer drama' with the Centaurs but I am thinking it will be more "Its been 10,000 years madam....this is now a Wendy's" than it will be "plight of my people".

I gave up trying to play after about 30 min last night around 630. Tried again around midnight and when I logged on I saw that Area-52 was going down in 2 minutes. Decided to call it a night and try again this morning.

Logged on around 7am and everything has been stable. I'm quite enjoying questing through the new zones. As stated above the instancing makes it so no area seems too overcrowded. I haven't played an expansion launch in WoW since WoD, which was a complete and utter shit show.

Why does every female voice acting in this shit sound like this but with way more cringe

Penance said:

Why does every female voice acting in this shit sound like this but with way more cringe

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I started the xpac with only game sounds/voices on and every time an NPC talked I heard the immortal words of Dr. Lexus playing in my head:


So I turned down the sound and put on some music, just like the good old days in raid.

I also gave up playing last night. They fixed the connection issue, but I was still getting 1000 to 5000 ping. I died 3 times in a row to the lag. Hit the rez button, have 1 minute of lag, and then straight to the release corpse button.

Penance said:

Why does every female voice acting in this shit sound like this but with way more cringe

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I know yer not throwing shade at the greatest female antagonist of the 1990s!

I will say, however, that all the new voice talent they added for this expansion seems to be knawing the scenery to the Nth degree.

On a whim I decided to look at the 'talent build and rotations' for my spec and they seemed to pick all the talents that I decided were not fun so I guess I'll just be sub-optimal and I'm okay with that since 'sub-optimal' in their vernacular = 2% less than ideal using perfect sim

This is why you just turn everything on low, and blast your music. The story is long gone from this game, no reason to pay attention anymore. Later if you care, read a TLDR about the expansion to get some clue to the lore(which has just got more convoluted than ever in the last couple of expansions). Which is sad, dragon aspect lore was one of my favorites from the Warcraft universe, now its all weird.

I dont know whats worse, the WoW voice acting for some characters or the constant attack song in EQ. Either way, I havent played those games with sound on in years lol.

I am running Azeroth Autopilot Reforged, so It auto accepts/turns in all quest and cancels all cut scenes, but there are still unskipable RP. I used to mute the whole game, but DBM audio alerts were helpful, so go used to some game sounds.

Animosity said:

I dont know whats worse, the WoW voice acting for some characters or the constant attack song in EQ. Either way, I havent played those games with sound on in years lol.

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They should do what SquareEnix did and go with a British agency.

Cybsled said:

They should do what SquareEnix did and go with a British agency.

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Would they do the EQ attack music a capella like Smooth McGroove?

Runnen said:

Would they do the EQ attack music a capella like Smooth McGroove?

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Here Comes Treble!

Cybsled said:

They should do what SquareEnix did and go with a British agency.

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They have a bunch of proper actors doing FF14 voice acting including some Game of Thrones people (eg Roose Bolton and Gendry).

I'm assuming that Blizzard are being cheap with in house "talent" which means it's all Californian diversity blobs.

couldn't help but laugh at how forced the two gay profession dudes were in the ruby shrine, nothing manlier than a guy at a forge calling his boyfriend honey

ty blizzard

Chris said:

They have a bunch of proper actors doing FF14 voice acting including some Game of Thrones people (eg Roose Bolton and Genry).

I'm assuming that Blizzard are being cheap with in house "talent" which means it's all Californian diversity blobs.

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I remember the first several warframe notable npcs were voiced in house. The origoonal vey hek raids

Animosity said:

I dont know whats worse, the WoW voice acting for some characters or the constant attack song in EQ. Either way, I havent played those games with sound on in years lol.

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I actually think FFXIV did something extremely well here: making all the characters British.

The American accents on all the characters are honestly the part throwing me off. It's just not high fantasy or comic fantasy.

All the female VA's I've heard so far, the new ones, have all been very "Ma'am-esque"... gives off the very tranny vibe. The VA of mostly everyone also has that overly dramatic slow talking, so stupid. Only 2 instances of homosexuality being put on display so far though (miners/blacksmith as mentioned already, and a couple lesbians in the Drac starter zone).